A young Tucson woman found dead in the trash days after she was reported missing. It's a gruesome case detectives in Nashville have been working on for almost a year and a half.
Thousands of miles away from where their daughter was murdered, the family here in Tucson still has many questions.
Although it has only been a year and a half, Trevor and Amy Brown remember the day clearly. "Our lives have forever been changed and altered," Brown said. It was December 17 2016, just a week before Christmas, when they got a call all parents dread. Their daughter Ashley, 27, who had recently moved to Nashville had gone missing from her friend's apartment.
According to detectives in Nashville, after a night out, Ashley stepped outsIde of the apartment and that was the last time she was seen alive. " She was last seen walking out of the apartment and next thing you know she was found in the garbage," Detective Matthew Filter with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.
Her body was tossed in the garbage near her friend's apartment and later picked up by a garbage truck. That truck driver is who discovered Ashley's body with the rest of his garbage pickup- when he got to the landfill. Seventeen months later, that's still all they know." She walked outside to smoke a cigarette and the wrong person came around," Detective Filter added.
According to police, Brown's murder was brutal, an autopsy report shows she was killed by multiple blunt force injuries and strangulation. Brown suffered several injuries before she died and some of those injuries were caused by the dumpster and garbage truck, Detective Filter said.
Thousands of miles from Nashville, Brown's family here in Tucson is still looking for closure and searching for what happened to their daughter. "It is hard to accept the fact that nobody heard anything, somebody had to have heard something," Ashley's stepmother Amy Brown said.
Her parents say they are not looking for justice, but their biggest concern is that someone so cold blooded is still out on the streets. "If they think they got away with it, they might try to do it again," Brown said. That's why they're still hoping someone with even a small piece of information will come forward.
While Nashville Police search for that lead, the family left behind here in Tucson hopes for closure in their daughter's death.
