On the night of December 4th, 2014, 19-year-old Jasmine Moody walked out of a house on Detroit’s east side. The windchill that night was near zero, with snow already on the ground. She was wearing a hoodie — nothing else. She left her cellphone inside. Her ID. Her purse. Her coat.
She has never been seen again.
More than a decade later, no one has been arrested. No one has been charged. And for years, Jasmine’s disappearance barely registered outside of Detroit — a fact her own family, community activists, and national advocacy organizations have all pointed to directly. This is her story, and the questions that still don’t have answers.
Who Jasmine Was
Jasmine Sherea Moody was born on January 1st, 1996. Her family has roots in Arkansas, but she was raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where she graduated from O.D. Wyatt High School in the spring of 2014. She made the honor roll consistently, danced, and was deeply involved in her school’s ROTC program.
By 16, she’d already decided she wanted to become a nurse. That fall, she enrolled at Texas Woman’s University in Denton as a freshman — and kept doing what she’d always done, making the honor roll again in her very first semester while continuing to dance and train through ROTC.
Her stepfather, Patrick Kidd, has described her as someone who changed the temperature of a room just by being in it: “Jasmine was ahead of her time. Every moment with her was good.” Her mother, Lisa, has echoed that — talking about her daughter as popular, social, and endlessly energetic. “She always had a smile on her face,” Lisa has said. “Always, always.”
Friends back home noticed her absence the same way her family noticed her presence. Christine Henry, a close friend and senior at Wyatt when Jasmine disappeared, has described how uncharacteristic it was to lose contact with her — how calls kept going straight to voicemail, and how wrong that felt for someone as reachable as Jasmine had always been.
Almost everyone who has spoken publicly about Jasmine — her mother, her stepfather, her friends — has said some version of the same thing: this isn’t like her.
The Relationship With Brittany
Sometime in mid-2014, while still living in Texas, Jasmine connected online with a young woman in Detroit named Brittany. They met on Twitter, and whatever it was between them moved fast and lasted — by the time Jasmine disappeared, they’d reportedly been close for around two years.
What kind of relationship it actually was depends on who you ask. Detroit Police have said on the record they believed Jasmine and Brittany were more than friends. Jasmine’s mother has described it as platonic. Both accounts can’t fully be reconciled, and neither has ever been resolved publicly.
Jasmine’s first visit to Detroit came earlier in 2014. It went well enough that when Thanksgiving arrived, she made plans to go back — flying in on November 25th to spend the holiday with Brittany and her family. By every account, the visit itself was warm, right up until it very suddenly wasn’t.
Jasmine was scheduled to fly home on December 5th. She never got there.
The Night of December 4th
At some point that evening, an argument broke out between Jasmine and Brittany over something Brittany saw on Jasmine’s Facebook. From there, the timeline depends entirely on whose account you read.
Sonia, Brittany’s mother, says Brittany stormed out first to cool off, and a few minutes later, Jasmine followed — with her belongings in hand. Brittany’s own account is that she encountered Jasmine outside, warned her it wasn’t safe to wander a neighborhood she didn’t know, took her belongings back, and headed inside expecting Jasmine to follow. She says that by the time she went back out, Jasmine was already gone.
Brittany described the moment to the Detroit News in her own words: “I thought she went for a walk. I went for a walk to grab a cigarette and came back, but Jasmine didn’t.”
The family says they searched the area themselves for about fifteen minutes before calling Detroit Police.
That fifteen-minute window is worth sitting with. It’s a fast response — faster than the pattern typically seen in missing persons cases, where families often wait hours or even days before involving police, usually assuming the person just needs space. Read one way, fifteen minutes reflects a family that understood exactly how dangerous the conditions were for someone unfamiliar with the neighborhood and badly underdressed for the cold. Read another way, it’s an unusually quick escalation for what started as an argument between two adults. Neither reading proves anything on its own — but it’s one more detail in this case that doesn’t sit comfortably no matter which direction you approach it from.
There’s also a timing question underneath the trip itself. Jasmine’s eleven-day visit — November 25th through the scheduled December 5th return — ran four days past when Texas Woman’s University’s residence halls reopened after Thanksgiving break, landing her back on campus with just a single day of buffer before the final stretch of her first semester began. For a student every source describes as disciplined and academically driven, that’s a striking amount of margin to leave herself. Whether that reflects a first-semester freshman’s inexperience with how much time she’d actually need before finals, or something else going on in the relationship that made this trip different from a simple holiday visit, is a question nobody has ever really answered.
What Police Found
When Detroit Police arrived, the first thing that struck them wasn’t outside — it was inside the house. Officer Mike Pacteles, who led the investigation, found Jasmine’s cellphone, ID, jacket, purse, and all her other belongings still there. In his words: “It’s definitely not normal for a 19-year-old girl to walk away without those things.”
The weather made the missing coat even harder to explain. “With the wind-chill, it was probably below zero degrees that night,” Pacteles said. “And there was snow on the ground. So she was not dressed for the conditions.”
Detroit Police and Michigan State Police executed a search warrant on the home and brought in the state crime lab to process it. Ground searches went out into the surrounding blocks in the Van Dyke and Mack area. None of it turned up anything.
Nine months later, with no leads, Jasmine’s mother and stepfather hired private investigator Scott Lewis to work the case alongside police. Lewis led community ground searches, conducted his own interviews, and brought in cadaver dogs. Still nothing — no remains, no clothing, no trace.
Lewis’s own assessment: “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she was kidnapped.”
A Case That Almost Wasn’t Told
By the one-year mark, the language from Jasmine’s family had shifted from hope to endurance. “It’s been a year,” her stepfather said. “I haven’t heard her voice. I don’t know if she is alive or if she is dead.” By 2018, when NBC’s Dateline picked up the case for a three-years-later feature, Lisa’s words were quietly devastating: “It still hurts as if it happened yesterday, because I don’t have any closure.”
Throughout all of it, national attention stayed minimal — a gap that hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Black and Missing Foundation featured Jasmine’s case in Essence Magazine’s “Bring Her Home for the Holidays” series as early as 2015. Co-founder Natalie Wilson put it directly: “No one knows what happened to her, and the case should not die — the media coverage should not die — until Jasmine’s family has answers.”
Multiple sources covering this case have drawn a direct comparison to Lauren Spierer, a 20-year-old college student whose 2011 disappearance in Indiana became a sustained national story. Jasmine’s case — with a search warrant, a crime lab, and years of unanswered questions — never left Detroit in the same way. It’s a pattern with a name: Missing White Woman Syndrome, the well-documented disparity in coverage and public pressure between missing white women and missing women of color facing comparable circumstances.
Nearly a Decade Later
By 2023, tensions around the case escalated. Community activists visited the family home, where Brittany’s sister, answered the door: “We all cared about her. She walked out of this damn house and wasn’t seen again, and now this is what we’re dealing with.” Sonia described someone approaching Brittany directly and threatening her at gunpoint over the disappearance. Dajiona’s response to years of public suspicion: “I get tired of this. They’re treating us like we’re criminals. We didn’t do nothing to that girl.”
Two things remain true at once here. The family called police themselves the night Jasmine disappeared — not the behavior typically associated with concealment. And nearly a decade of unanswered questions, left belongings, and a timeline that has never fully added up hasn’t gone away either. Both are part of this story. Neither cancels out the other.
Where Things Stand
As of the most recent reporting available, Jasmine Moody’s case remains open. No arrests. No charges. No remains ever recovered. She’s listed in NamUs and the Doe Network, and a $2,500 reward through Crime Stoppers of Michigan is still active.
Jasmine was 19 years old. She was going to be a nurse. She made the honor roll in her very first semester of college, and she never got to make it back for her second.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Jasmine Moody, please contact the Detroit Police Department at (313) 596-5752, or Crime Stoppers of Michigan at 1-800-SPEAK-UP.
This post is a companion to the Vanished Voices episode “No Coat, No Phone: What Happened to Jasmine Moody?” Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Resources:
Charley Project. (2018, February 27). Jasmine Sherea Moody. Jasmine Sherea Moody – The Charley Project
ClickOnDetroit. (2014, December 12). Police: Texas student missing since visit to Detroit. Police: Texas student missing since visit to Detroit
ClickOnDetroit. (2015, November 5). Family, investigators still searching for missing college student in Detroit. Family, investigators still searching for missing college student in Detroit
Disappeared Blog. (2022, May 25). Jasmine Moody. Jasmine Moody
Doe Network. (n.d.). 4792DFMI: Jasmine Sherea Moody. 4792DFMI – Jasmine Sherea Moody
Essence. (2015). Bring her home for the holidays: Jasmine Moody. Bring Her Home for the Holidays: Jasmine Moody – Essence
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NewsOne. (2021, April 17). Parents of Texas college student who went missing in Detroit suspect foul play. Parents of Jasmine Moody Suspect Foul Play
Scott Lewis PI. (2018, February 13). Jasmine Moody case: Three years later. Jasmine Moody case: Three years later
Sobell, C. (2022, August 22). Michigan mystery: What happened to Jasmine Moody? Medium. Michigan Mystery: What Happened to Jasmine Moody? | Medium
Texas Woman’s University Office of the Registrar. (n.d.). Academic calendar. TWU Academic, Registration, and Payment Deadlines Fall 2013 – August 26
True Case Files. (2019, August 6). The disappearance of Jasmine Moody. True Case Files: The Disappearance of Jasmine Moody
WXYZ Detroit. (2021, September 27). Examining a cold missing person’s case in metro Detroit in wake of Gabby Petito interest. Examining a cold missing person’s case in metro Detroit in wake of Gabby Petito interest