Murder trial opens in death of Detroit

DETROIT (AP) — A man who dropped a Detroit-area teenager’s body in a dumpster “left behind a trail of digital evidence” implicating him in her death, despite a fruitless, extraordinary search to find the remains in a landfill, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.

Jaylin Brazier, 25, is on trial for second-degree murder in the death of 17-year-old Zion Foster, whose body hasn’t been found.

Detroit police in 2022 raked through tons of rotting trash at a suburban landfill to try to find any trace, a rare step by a law enforcement agency. The search, sometimes in 90-degree heat and humidity, was called off after five months.

“Was she choked? Was she raped? Did she die somehow of some inexplicable natural cause?” assistant prosecutor Ryan Elsey said in his opening remarks to a jury. “The search for Zion’s body became paramount to the investigation.”