Original subtitles

She's obviously deceased.

For her to be murdered so brutally,

that did appear to be a crime of passion.

She had severe discoloration around her neck.

This is someone that she must have known.

Her friends and family were so heartbroken by this.

She's just a great person.

We can't find an enemy in the world of Sasha.

The people that you would normally look at--

They all had alibis.

She was a social media influencer,

producing all these videos.

Was she being stalked?

Is there somebody downtown that is preying on women?

This building that was supposed to be safe

with security, we desperately need

to find the killer and give some justice for Sasha.

Was somebody following her?

Was somebody waiting for her?

In the video surveillance, she was walking

in the direction of her apartment.

She started running.

Could that have been somebody that was stalking her?

In America, we're the first line of defense.

Drug busts, serial killers,

armed robbers, predators of every kind--

we take them off the streets.

People love telling stories about us.

They don't know the half of it.

We save that for when we're talking cop to cop.

This is "PD True."

So, Scott, you're a watch commander.

How do you get involved in this case?

Jorge Colina was a 31-year veteran

of the Miami Police Department,

who worked his way up from patrol officer

to chief of department.

Well, one of my patrol guys went to a call

where there were some friends trying

to report somebody missing.

They had an idea that there might be

a little bit more something to it.

So they called me.

I was like, I'll swing by there,

and we'll see what else we can do.

Scott Smith worked in law enforcement for 28 years.

As an Orlando PD lieutenant and midnight watch commander,

he held the highest rank in his division after hours.

You arrive there, and what's your first impression?

I talked to a couple of the friends.

They'd all gone out downtown to a bar the night before,

had a good time.

When they split up downtown, and they were like, hey,

do you want us to go with you?

She's like, no, I'll be fine.

They said, you know,

we split up, went our separate ways,

and nobody's heard from her since.

Not only had they not heard from her

in this 24-hour period, she hadn't posted anything

on any of her platforms.

Sasha's, you know, mid-20s.

And when you have that at somebody her age,

and they don't do the social media stuff for that long,

there's probably a little something wrong there.

They had also put me in contact with her mother,

with Sasha's mom.

I talked to her on the phone.

She was also very concerned because she's,

you know, 1,000 miles away.

She can't really do anything.

So she's getting worried.

They have a very good relationship.

"I talk to my daughter all the time.

This is out of the norm for her."

The officers had already knocked

on the door and no response.

The door was not a key door, but it was one of the keypads,

where you put in a code, and that throws the deadbolt.

So when I found that out, I was like, well,

we didn't have to break anything.

And I'll be more than willing to open a door

and check to see if she was inside.

So I took a couple of officers up there.

I told one of the officers to put the code in.

You could hear the deadbolt throw,

and then we opened the door.

Anything concerning from the initial scan?

No.

Everything's--you know, nothing in disarray.

The officer had gone to the one bathroom attached

to the master bedroom, kind of checked the shower

and looked around real quick, and nobody was in there.

And he turned around and looked at me.

He was like, ah, fuck.

You knew from the look in his face, it's not good.

Yeah, and as I turned around, I saw the hair sticking

out from the comforter.

I kind of stepped closer to the bed

and lifted the comforter off where her hair was.

I could tell she had been there a while.

There was a little bit of discoloration to the body

as far as the blood settling.

I could tell she was naked up top.

Her left arm was in a very awkward position underneath,

almost like you could hold somebody down that way.

She had severe discoloration around her neck.

- Trauma? - Yes, trauma.

At that point, though, I was like, she's obviously deceased.

Now you're thinking, time to preserve.

That's when I made the first call to the Homicide sergeant.

And that was you, Dan? You got that call?

It was mine.

You get a hold of your guys.

They start to head out, and you start to head out as well.

We were all at home at that point, off duty.

It was probably late into the evening.

And then we all responded out from home.

Lieutenant Dan Brady supervised

the Violent Crime Unit of Orlando PD's

Criminal Investigation Division

before becoming a homicide sergeant.

Do you go and start interviewing,

or do you jump into the apartment

and start processing that scene?

The crime scene investigators,

they processed everything, every doorknob

from the front door all the way back

to the bedroom and the bathroom.

She lived alone, and she was a female.

And the toilet seat in the her master bathroom was up.

And that's unusual.

There was a strong smell of bleach in there.

And that smell of bleach, you're thinking,

someone wasn't in a rush to leave this crime scene, right?

They took their time to clean up,

obviously, or maybe try to hide the fact

that they were even there.

This looks like the scene was sanitized

by the offender, probably somebody she knows,

'cause there's no forced entry.

I'd worked a lot of homicides.

This one was definitely one that's consistent

with a crime of passion.

This is someone that she must have known

because you know, things aren't destroyed,

thrown around, et cetera.

We were interviewing different witnesses

and friends.

What did they tell you about her, about Sasha?

She was amazing.

Everybody we talked to, not a bad word about her.

Hey, guys and gals, I'm Sasha.

She was an early social media influencer.

She had several videos on YouTube,

where she would promote apartment complexes.

Hey, guys, I'm Sasha from 407Apartments.com,

and I'm also this year's AAGO education chair.

I'd like to invite all of you guys out to Lisa Palooza.

She was captivating on camera.

Kind of a bubbly personality.

Very bubbly.

So did you learn anything from them on the scene

other than her background?

They'd been to one of the Orlando soccer games

and then left to go to a nearby bar.

And that's when we learned that she had went--

last seen at The Attic.

One of the people we talked to was a friend named Anthony.

You learn that she left about 12:30 or so.

And you got that information from Anthony,

who was on the scene, right? - Yes.

And what was her condition

from when she left the bar?

She was intoxicated.

You know, he did mention that.

But she was being responsible and walking home.

And that's the last that Anthony was able

to tell us about her movement.

Was there anything about him that

made him suspicious, like did--

romantic relationship in the past or anything like that?

We wanted to explore everything about Anthony,

since he had been with her before.

They had dated before.

He gave us a buccal swab for DNA.

So he's someone, obviously, you're looking at, Anthony.

Definitely.

But he was overwhelmingly cooperative.

And everything he told us was checking out.

He gave us additional information

about Sasha's personal life.

We were trying to track down

some of her other, you know,

romantic or past romantic folks to talk to them.

They were all, I mean, more than willing to give us

buccal swabs to get their DNA.

While we were doing that, we learned the building

had 24-hour security.

And 24-hour security is what,

physical security, cameras, anything else?

There are cameras.

You know, not every portion of the building

was covered in cameras.

This murder happened-- you know,

it was a Friday night.

By the time we found out she was murdered, it was Saturday.

So it is difficult sometimes over the weekend

to get video surveillance back.

Anything else in terms of evidence?

The crime scene investigators,

by the time they finished, the first piece

of real evidence we had that night was

an unidentified shoe print.

Now, do you remember what size?

It was consistent with a male athletic shoe.

And you mentioned that the lid on the toilet was up,

and that was processed as well.

Was there a hit there?

There's one unidentified fingerprint on it.

So you're hoping that's gonna help.

Now you start to get some of the feeds back

of the requested video, right? - Yes.

We wanted to make sure, was she being stalked?

Was somebody--you know, knew where she lived?

Was somebody following her?

Was somebody waiting for her?

So we don't know, right, who may know her.

And she doesn't know because that's how social media works.

Someone's like, intimately familiar with you

because you post.

And you have no idea who's paying attention.

- Absolutely. - What video do you get?

And what does that video tell you?

It's raw video footage from The Attic along Orange Avenue

back to where her apartment was.

At 12:30 is when she leaves the attic, roughly.

- She's walking by herself. - Okay.

But it was when she got a couple minutes

away from the bar when we picked up another feed,

she was running.

And that definitely got our attention.

Could that have been somebody that was stalking her?

Could that have been somebody following her from the bar?

We are concerned maybe somebody was chasing her.

Is there somebody downtown that is preying on women?

And what do we find out?

One of the things that closed that gap

of seeing her running and--

were the two ladies in the Uber.

After she had been running, she stopped,

and two ladies assisted her in getting her in an Uber

and taking her to her apartment.

We had no idea who they were.

We put out her picture, seeking the public's help.

And the two ladies that were--

you know, that tried to help her

and get her back to her apartment safely

came forward to let us know who they were.

They were concerned about her safety

and wanted to make sure she got back to her building safely.

So these were Good Samaritans.

They were Good Samaritans and they were helping her.

They saw her.

They probably thought that they had succeeded,

right, in getting her to the apartment complex.

They did.

Yeah, that's-- that's terrible.

When they found out, they were both just devastated.

And then what did you see when

you got the video from the apartment complex,

at different feeds there?

She arrived at her apartment complex after 1:45 a.m.

We learned that the security guard, Stephen Duxbury--

we talked to him at great length.

He didn't want to allow her entry to the building

because she didn't have her key fob.

And there was another unknown male who let her

into the apartment complex.

She followed him in and started heading to her apartment.

So we wanted to try to find out who that person was.

Are you able to track her all the way back

to her apartment through this video?

Or are they-- some gaps in there?

There are some gaps.

It's kind of a square building,

and there's not cameras all the way around.

And she lived on the back side, out of camera view.

And did the security guard say he walked her to the door?

He helped her try to find her apartment.

And then she was having issues remembering her code.

As we were talking to the security guard,

we learned she thought possibly that

she had a fob in her vehicle.

And he walked her down to the parking garage.

As they got there, she realized,

no, it's not in there.

So they circled back to her apartment.

Does she look distressed in that video or not really?

No.

Okay.

What happens next?

From what he told us, he left her

because he thought it was more important that he should go do

a sweep of the other floors, and left her unattended,

and hopefully, she would figure out how to get

into her apartment by herself.

And he said, after he swept the other floors and checked it,

he came back and she was not at her door anymore.

So he assumed she got back in her apartment.

So we were looking for who allowed her into the building.

But he went back to his floor and his apartment,

and they had no other interaction.

And he was very cooperative, too,

in everything that he told us.

He went straight to his apartment

and had no further interaction with Sasha

other than the buzzer in at the main entrance.

So, Dan, in terms of suspects, you're thinking,

obviously, this is a man,

just from the brutality of the attack,

the footprint that you were able to pick up.

The security guard, he was being helpful.

We were trying to roll the shoe prints of everybody.

So we asked if he was wearing the same shoes

as he wore the night before.

And he said, no, he was wearing different shoes.

But he offered that when his shift is over,

if somebody could follow him to his apartment,

he'd be willing to give us the shoes he was wearing

the night before to assist.

So in terms of actual contact,

what is it that you learned?

Who did she interact with last?

At 5:00 a.m., there was a strange text

that just said, "Ben."

That said "Ben"?

So we want to know who Ben was.

She's up at that time.

She's texting someone.

And we were really alarmed.

Did somebody come to her apartment?

And so, we desperately need to figure out who Ben was

and verify where he'd been.

What was their relationship? What do we learn?

We make a phone call to him, and he agrees to meet with us

and give us a statement and explain

his relationship with Sasha.

So he's got an alibi.

But you know, we wanted to get his DNA sample,

and he did cooperate and give us a buccal swab for DNA.

So definitely, until that DNA came back,

he was the last person that had been communicating with her.

But as we're going through the video, about 6:30 a.m.

the night of the murder on Friday night,

going into Saturday morning,

we see Stephen Duxbury walking out

with two trash bags in his hand.

Which jumped out at us immediately

because he's supposed to be off at 6:00.

And when we zoomed in closer,

we could see that they were kind of

a unique style trash bag.

And it was the same style trash bags that

Sasha had in her apartment.

Wow.

It could have been, obviously, any trash.

But the fact that they matched the ones in the apartment

is pretty--pretty significant.

Very significant.

And we didn't see her anymore.

That was the last piece of video surveillance

from that night, was him taking the trash bags out.

Not only that, we went through the hours of footage

after, you know, he left her to go do a sweep.

If he was doing sweeps, he would have

been picked up by cameras on the other floors.

He was nowhere to be seen.

So his story isn't really matching up

what he had described.

He was supposed to keep an hourly journal

of his activities.

He's not noting any activity in his report.

We don't capture any more footage

of those two together because, you know,

the camera is out of view from her apartment.

By the end of the night, we were all concerned

and alarmed about Duxbury.

There is no forced entry, right?

The door was locked.

We thought it was somebody that--

you know, that she invited into her apartment,

somebody she knew.

But as we started talking to all of those possibilities,

they all had alibis.

And their alibis were very strong,

like, they had witnesses.

But the security guard, Stephen Duxbury,

for several hours in the middle of the night,

he was pretty much unaccounted for.

But otherwise, he has been cooperative, right?

It's not like he disappeared.

I mean, he's come to work.

He allowed you to roll his shoes.

He is cooperative.

I followed him to his apartment up in Port Orange,

and he turned over the shoes that he

was wearing the night before.

When we got the video surveillance back,

wait a minute.

Neither one of the shoes he was wearing

are the ones that he's in the surveillance camera wearing

the night of the murder.

So now we have a problem.

He's told me, yeah, these are the shoes and given them to me,

and it's a lie.

This is the first time that you guys see,

hey, he's being deceptive.

He's lying.

He wasted our time to drive an hour and a half

to his apartment and gave us false information.

And, you know, we--

at that point, we turned up the heat.

We brought him back in for a polygraph.

You want to squeeze him a little bit now.

You want to challenge him with this or not yet?

At that point, we're walking the line

to still get him to cooperate with us.

And he agreed to come in for a polygraph.

But you--you don't want him to think "they're on to me."

You just want to make it seem like, hey,

this is all part of still routine investigation.

Everybody's going through this.

Everybody's living the same thing.

You're no different than anyone else.

And that's what we told him,

and he willingly agreed to come in on his own time

and take that to clear his name.

And the polygraph, I mean, how did that go?

So we had not disclosed as the police department

Sasha's cause of death.

All we disclosed, it was a homicide investigation.

We hadn't disclosed to anybody

that she was, you know, strangled.

- Okay. - And one of the questions,

you know, was asking, you know, how Sasha was murdered.

Was she shot by a gun?

Was she stabbed?

Was she strangled?

And when that strangled question came up,

he went off the chart.

Another one was, did you enter her apartment?

And he was off the charts.

And the polygraph examiner determined

that he was being untruthful.

And Duxbury requested an attorney.

At that point, we put together a search warrant

to go search his house.

What do you find in terms of physical evidence?

We thoroughly searched the place,

and we found the shoes hidden in the back

of one of the closets.

The shoeprint that was found inside Sasha's apartment.

- Yeah, it was the same. - It's a match.

It's a match. It's the same design.

It's the same color.

It's the same marking. It's the same shoes.

He, you know, flat out lied.

We recovered his phone.

We found the phone had been set to a factory reset--

everything wiped off the phone.

But we did a search warrant to his Google searches.

And we found during that time where he was unaccounted for,

on his device, he was searching how

to bypass hack codes for that specific lock

on Sasha's apartment. - Wow.

The keypad that we needed the combination to

in the beginning, he had searched that.

Is there anything that could tie him to the actual crime?

We had the automated

fingerprint identification system,

where they can run against any known people

that have prints.

Before getting a job as a security guard,

he would have to submit his fingerprints.

Yes.

And the fingerprint that was on that toilet seat

belonged to Stephen Duxbury.

So that puts him inside.

Puts him inside the apartment.

Some of the evidence takes a little while

to come back as far as if there's any DNA found.

- He's given you a DNA swab. - Yes.

We got a DNA match from evidence

collected by the medical examiner,

and it was matched to Duxbury--

- That's it. - On her body.

Yeah, that's-- that's what you needed there,

was that DNA hit on her body.

And he was arrested.

It'd been days of us working, you know,

18-, 20-hour days to, you know, find the killer

and give some justice for Sasha.

You have security, and the person that's there

is the person that should be helping you.

And this turned out to be the person that killed you.

Can't find an enemy in the world of Sasha.

And then it turns into this unfortunate story.

I will never have a last supper with my daughter again.

I won't have birthdays.

Her father will never get to walk her down the aisle.

What he has done is broke the chain

that we had as a family.

You guys did a phenomenal job.

It doesn't take the pain away from a parent.

We know that from experience.

But, man, it's a big deal to be able to say we did our job.

We know who did this,

and they're paying the price for it.

Absolutely.