Twenty-year-old Jazmine Trotter lived in Cleveland, Ohio, and was described by friends and family as independent, strong-willed, and affectionate. She had an identical twin sister, Yazmine, with whom she shared an especially close relationship.
Jazmine was also raising a four-year-old boy named Juelz. Despite her young age, she was working and trying to build a future for herself and her child.
On Friday, March 22nd, 2013, Jazmine left her boyfriend’s home in Cleveland to walk to work. Contemporary accounts differ slightly on the exact time she departed. Some reported that she left around four a.m., while a subsequent Cleveland police statement placed her departure at approximately five a.m. What is clear is that she set off during the early morning hours, before sunrise, and never reached her workplace.
When Jazmine failed to arrive, concern gradually spread among her loved ones. Attempts to contact her were unsuccessful, and family members began asking friends and acquaintances whether anyone had seen her. Her absence was particularly troubling because there was no indication that she had voluntarily decided to abandon her normal routine. By March 23rd, she had been reported missing.
Her family did not simply wait for information. They began searching the area themselves, concentrating on the route Jazmine regularly used to get to work. That search took them through a part of Cleveland’s east side containing vacant buildings, overgrown properties, and abandoned houses.
Eventually, their attention turned to an empty house on East 93rd Street, and it was there that the search came to its devastating conclusion. On the afternoon of Sunday, March 24th, Jazmine’s family members discovered her body at an abandoned house at 3980 East 93rd Street, near Harvard Avenue. Her mother, Monique Williams, was among those searching. Contemporary reports identified Jazmine’s brother and other relatives as participating in the search that led to the discovery.
Personal belongings were found on the property. According to accounts of the investigation, family members discovered items including Jazmine’s purse and makeup bag before locating her body beneath the rear porch. Jazmine was partially undressed, and the circumstances immediately suggested that she had been the victim of a violent attack.
Police received a call about an unresponsive person at approximately one thirty p.m. Emergency medical personnel arrived, but Jazmine was already dead.
The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Jazmine had died from blunt-force trauma and cervical compression, meaning pressure applied to the neck. Investigators also established that she had been sexually assaulted.
The precise sequence of events remains unclear. Investigators have not publicly established exactly where Jazmine first encountered her killer, how long the attack lasted, or whether she was killed at the abandoned property or brought there afterward.
The fact that her body was discovered along her usual journey to work raised the possibility that she had been attacked while walking through the neighborhood. However, the details of her movements after leaving her boyfriend’s home have never been fully established in the public record.
For investigators, the physical evidence offered at least one promising avenue. DNA recovered during the investigation would soon lead police to a potential suspect: forty-two-year-old Jerome Ogletree.
Ogletree had a criminal history, and investigators believed they had sufficient evidence to seek his arrest. Police also reported that Ogletree and Jazmine had worked through the same employment agency, suggesting a possible prior connection between them.
On April 2nd, 2013, Ogletree was arrested and questioned about Jazmine’s murder. The arrest came at a time when Cleveland police were investigating several serious attacks against women on the city’s east side.
Back in December of 2012, in fact, thirty-seven-year-old Jameela Hasan was found stabbed to death in the East 93rd Street area.
And on March 28th, 2013, four days after Jazmine’s body was discovered, forty-five-year-old Christine Marie Malone was found dead in a vacant lot near East 93rd Street and Bessemer Avenue. Christine was the mother of eight children. Like Jazmine, she had been reported missing before her body was discovered.
The medical examiner determined that Christine had suffered blunt-force trauma to the head and had been strangled. The similarities between the two murders were disturbing. Both victims were women found in neglected properties on Cleveland’s east side, both had experienced severe physical violence, and both had died from injuries involving the head and neck. Their bodies had been discovered within days of one another.
Police also discussed a third incident in which another woman had been attacked and sexually assaulted on March 30th in the area of East 116th Street. That woman survived after witnesses interrupted the assault.
And on May 28th, twenty-one-year-old Ashley Leszyeski’s badly decomposed remains were discovered in a vacant lot near East 93rd Street and Anderson Avenue. Investigators reported sharp-force injuries to her head and neck.
The Cleveland Division of Police initially maintained that there was insufficient evidence to establish a relationship among the murders. By 2017, authorities acknowledged that they could not rule out the possibility of a serial killer, but they still lacked evidence to support that conclusion.
There are important distinctions between the cases. The women suffered different injuries, their bodies were found in different circumstances, and no publicly established forensic evidence has linked all four murders to one offender. At the request of Cleveland police, the FBI became involved in the wider investigation into the attacks.
On April 5th, Jerome Ogletree appeared in court, charged with aggravated murder of Jazmine Trotter. He pleaded not guilty, and his bond was set at $1 million. Prosecutors indicated that additional charges might follow as the case proceeded toward a grand jury.
For Jazmine’s family, the arrest offered hope that someone would finally be held accountable. However, the apparent breakthrough did not lead to a conviction; the case against him was eventually dismissed. The specific circumstances surrounding the dismissal have not been clearly explained in publicly available reporting.
The following years brought little reported progress. In March 2019, Cleveland 19 News interviewed Jazmine’s mother and other relatives on the sixth anniversary of her death. The family confirmed that the charges against Ogletree had been dismissed and that the murder remained unsolved.
By 2023, a decade after Jazmine’s death, her identical twin Yazmine was still speaking publicly about the case. The continuing possibility that her sister’s killer remained free left her feeling unsafe.
No subsequent conviction in Jazmine’s murder has been documented as of this writing in October 2026, and the killing remains officially unsolved.
