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St. Johns County is a rapidly growing community tucked in the northeastern corner of Florida, south of Jacksonville. It is known for its history, its picturesque Florida beaches, and the quaint tourist hotspot of St. Augustine, one of the oldest American civilizations. It was the community of this beautiful, quiet corner of Florida that in 2021 saw one of the most unexpected and grisly murders in recent history.
It was Mother's Day weekend in May of 2021. The air was tinged with the anticipation of summer and, in the Bailey household, it also carried the essence of celebration. That Sunday, they were planning to celebrate the holiday together, topping off what was already an exciting weekend. Tristan Bailey, the youngest of five children in the household, had spent Friday with friends from school at a local event.
She then spent time with her family on Saturday, going out to dinner with her parents and siblings. Tristan, only 13 years old, was thriving as she wrapped up her seventh grade year at Patriot Oaks Academy. She was living the life of so many other young middle school students across America, focusing on school, friends, and sports.
Tristan was a passionate cheerleader, known for her energy and friendliness that easily made her popular among her classmates. When she arrived at home late on Saturday night with her family after going out to dinner, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The family prepared for bed, and around midnight, Tristan's sister saw her take a video call in the garage. Tragically, that would be the last time a member of the Bailey family would see Tristan alive.
As the Bailey household grew quiet with sleep, it was assumed that everyone was tucked away safely in their beds, getting rest before the following day's festivities. On Mother's Day morning, the Bailey household was filled with activity as the family prepared a celebratory breakfast.
Assuming Tristan was sleeping in and was still in bed, the Bailey siblings headed to her room to wake her up for breakfast. But when the Bailey children arrived in Tristan's room just before 10 a.m., she was nowhere to be found. Confused, the family searched the rooms of their house and the local area. But after 20 minutes passed with no evidence of Tristan's whereabouts, the parents began to panic. The Mother's Day breakfast and holiday plans were forgotten.
Harnessing technology, they attempted to find her location, which was usually shared through Snapchat or Life360. But Tristan was no longer sharing her location on any of the usual platforms. It was around 10:00 AM when Stacy, Tristan's mother, decided to call 911 and report her daughter missing. The search was on for the missing middle school girl,
For the next eight hours, police and the community would join in the desperate search for Tristan. Around six o'clock that day, Daniel Hart, a local community member who was out for an evening jog, decided to contribute his own efforts to the search that had been rattling his neighborhood all day. He began to look around the woods and the ponds at the end of the cul-de-sac near his house. To his horror, he spotted the body of a young girl near one of the ponds.
Upon his disturbing discovery, Hart immediately called 911. The police headed to the scene to find Tristan's body there in the woods. Her blonde hair red and matted with blood, and her shirt tattered. Her body was riddled with multiple stab wounds, covering her hands, neck, arms, and back.
It would later be revealed that she had been stabbed a total of 114 times, 49 of which were defensive wounds as she attempted to ward off the attack and fight for her life. Now that Tristan had been identified, the search transformed into an earnest race to find the killer who had committed such a gruesome crime and to bring whoever it was to justice. Part 1: Retracing Tristan Bailey's Steps
After Stacey Bailey reported her daughter missing, the police scrambled into action. Deputies started searching the close-knit neighborhood of Durban Crossing. Helicopters took to the skies. The news of Tristan's disappearance swept through the tight neighborhood as the community crawled with law enforcement officials hunting down leads.
In an effort to retrace Tristan's steps the night of her disappearance, the police conducted an interview with a neighborhood friend that would turn out to provide valuable insight into Tristan's final hours. Dofus Absher III, who went by "Trey", admitted that Tristan snuck out of her house and came over to his house in the wee hours of the morning that day for a late-night hangout. Absher revealed that another friend and classmate, Aiden Fucci, had also been part of the hangout.
More interestingly though, Fucci and Tristan left Absher's house together around 1 in the morning. Absher, who had assumed both had returned to their respective homes at that time, had not seen Tristan since. Naturally, the police followed this new lead, paying a visit to Fucci at his house. Fucci agreed to help the police follow the trail back to where he last saw Tristan.
He claimed they walked together for a period of time before parting ways, where he left her to go toward her house and he turned to walk back to his. He said he arrived back at his home between 3 and 3:30 in the morning. But for the deputy conducting the interview, something about Fucci's story was not adding up. Fucci supposedly left Absher's house around 1:00 AM. So how had he taken more than two hours to reach his own home?
which was less than a half an hour away in walking distance. In response to the question, Fuchi pivoted, revealing that there was more to the story. He claimed that an altercation occurred between him and Tristan after Tristan touched his genitals. As a result,
Fucci said he shoved Tristan to the ground and she hit her head. Fucci then stated he immediately walked away and did not see if Tristan stood up after the incident, claiming that his mind was fuzzy at the time from smoking marijuana at Absher's house. Fucci said he walked around the neighborhood alone for a period of time after his fight with Tristan before returning to his home, resulting in the long gap in time between when he left his friend's house and reached his own.
The only other piece of information he provided officers was that, after their argument, Tristan might have gone to see a drug dealer in his 20s. Based on Fucci's new story, the fuzzy edges of a crime began to take shape in the minds of investigators. Something sinister and illegal had occurred, but even then, they could not have fathomed how twisted this case would become.
In the meantime, other members of the police force were tracking down more friends of Tristan to see if they had heard from her. The police were also in the process of trying to find the geographic location of Tristan's phone, which would presumably be at or near her location. They were also trying to gain access to her text and phone records in an attempt to retrace her digital footsteps leading up to her disappearance.
It was only a couple hours later when Daniel Hart called in to the police, saying that he found the sprawled body not far from his residence. In that moment, the search for a missing child transformed into a dark murder investigation. The effort to restructure the timeline of what actually occurred in Tristan's final hours became the critical missing puzzle piece to solving the mystery of who had brutally killed her.
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Part 2: Security Cameras, Social Media, and Slip-Ups Mother's Day had drawn to a horrible close in the community of Durban Crossing with the horrific discovery of the body of Tristan Bailey.
The search had ended with the worst possible scenario. A murder had occurred. The killer was at large, and the community had lost a child. By the following morning, harsh yellow caution tape roped off multiple crime scenes that were of interest in the investigation. Criss-crossing the residential streets, they were in uncharacteristic sight in the normally quiet neighborhood, serving as a chilling reminder of what had unfolded only hours before.
The tight-knit community was reeling from the heinous crime and the unexpected loss. They planned a candlelight vigil for Tristan for the evening of May 10th. As loved ones, friends, and the community mourned, the police were honing in on the story of what actually happened to Tristan Bailey.
Directly after the discovery of Tristan's body in the woods, the police and the community were focused on filling in the gaps in their knowledge about where Tristan had been in the early hours of Sunday morning. They knew she had left her home to go to Absher's house to hang out with some friends in the neighborhood, but she had left his house at 1:00 a.m. Somewhere on the walk between Absher's house and her own, she had ended up in a remote patch of woods and had been murdered.
Investigators' eyes swiveled to the most vital witness they had thus far: Fucci, the last known individual to have seen Tristan alive. Fucci's story about his last supposed interaction with Tristan also raised eyebrows. His claim about having an altercation with Tristan during his last moments with her prompted more investigation into his claims. And with Fucci's story, questions still loomed. How had Tristan ended up in the woods?
Where had she gone after she and Fucci had their argument and parted ways? Gaping holes necessary to crack the case still remained in the timeline. Fucci had already begun to strike a strange chord with investigators during the afternoon of May 9th, as the frantic search for Tristan was underway. During the search, law enforcement officials had received information about a photo and message posted by Fucci on his Snapchat account. In the snap,
Fucci had taken a photo of himself in which he was flashing a peace sign in the back of a police squad car. Over the photo, Fucci had written, "Hey guys, has anybody seen Tristan lately?" Several others on the Snapchat had taken the photo and added additional text to create their own messages, ones that rang with criticism of Fucci's insensitive post. One took on a particularly ominous tone, reading, "You were with her, Aiden. You know what happened to her."
Fucci also posted several other unusual videos on Snapchat, mentioning that he was having fun in a cop car. Fucci's behavior on social media and his apparent altercation with Tristan, which was the last known sighting of her, prompted the police to take a special interest in Fucci's role in what had occurred that night.
Only a couple hours after the discovery of the body, they visited Fucci's house, marking it off with caution tape as an active area of interest in the investigation. And late Sunday night, they brought Fucci in for questioning. In their search for Tristan, the police had also obtained security footage from local businesses and residents in hopes that it would shed light on where Tristan had gone after leaving her friend's house. They were in luck.
Two security cameras in the neighborhood had picked up footage of two people wearing clothes that matched the descriptions of Fuchi and Tristan from that night, walking after leaving Absher's house. Just before 2 in the morning, the two individuals had been walking in the direction of a pond. About an hour and 45 minutes later, cameras picked up one person walking in the opposite direction away from the pond. And in his hands were the shoes that had been on his feet two hours ago.
They were Fuchi's black and white Nike shoes. That evening, Tristan had been found near that same pond, dead, in the interview room, under harsh lights and on record. Fuchi sat with his parents, who began to question Fuchi themselves. They were visibly concerned and agitated. So far, their son was the last person to see Tristan and had admitted to having a physical argument with her the night she disappeared.
He had been caught on security cameras walking with her shortly before her presumed death. From their perspective, things were not looking good for Fuchi. However, Fuchi acted as though he had no idea what had happened to her. Asking if she was alright and if she had been found, Fuchi's father started to grill Fuchi about his story. Asking if what he had told the police earlier that day was true.
He asked his son why he had been wet when he arrived home that night and why he had removed his shoes as seen in the security footage. Fuchi explained away both inquiries, saying that the shoes were too uncomfortable for him to wear for extended periods of time and that he had gotten wet from falling down. Still, Fuchi's stories were wishy-washy, with him adjusting the details constantly as he went along. Yet he assured his parents they had nothing to worry about
He was innocent and did not know how Tristan wound up dead. But it would take less than a day for the police to obtain a search warrant and look through Fucci's house, where Fucci had failed to cover his tracks well. Investigators found a copious amount of evidence indicating that Fucci had been involved in the struggle and subsequent murder in the woods by the pond. They discovered his wet Nike shoes and clothing splattered with blood in his room, as well as blood and dirt on the drain in his bathroom sink.
Wet jeans from the night before lay in a laundry basket. The police also found disturbing drawings and an empty knife sheath in his room. One final piece of evidence sealed Fucci's fate. Investigators found the murder weapon, a buck knife that matched a fragment that had broken off and lodged itself in Tristan's scalp. The knife was confirmed to have belonged to Fucci.
Paired with DNA evidence found at the scene that placed Fucci there, the police charged Fucci, only 14 years old at the time, for the second-degree murder of his fellow classmate and supposed friend. Although Fucci continued to insist that he was not guilty of the crime, all the evidence, and his inability to stick to a consistent narrative, pointed to him being responsible for the stabbing
In many ways, it seemed Fucci had failed to plan and cover up his crime well. He had been captured within hours of the slaying, and there was already a copious amount of solid evidence stacked against him. Investigators had found their killer, but why had Fucci committed such a heinous act? Could it really have been all because of a brief altercation that night? Or did it have deeper, more sinister roots?
The police now were searching for a motive to explain why Fucci felt that it was warranted to stab another young teenager 114 times. Part 3: Aiden Fucci: The troubled mind of a brutal killer Fucci was charged with second-degree murder, but the investigation was far from over. There were still questions swirling around the case about Fucci's motive for killing Tristan. In the investigation that unfolded following his arrest,
The police and the community gained a shocking view into the mind of Fucci, painting the image of a troubled teenager whose behavior and words leading up to the tragic incident were full of warning signs and foreboding indications of what was to come. A murder was a long time coming, it had just become a question of when it would happen and who the victim would be. Most people fear death and murder, but Fucci was different.
He had an intense fixation on death and the act of killing. In fact, this was not a secret. He spoke of it often, regularly referencing murder and fantasies of killing people to friends and his girlfriend. Frightening sketches found in his notebooks depicted death, murder, and mutilated corpses. Fuji also told friends he heard voices in his head encouraging him to kill people when he became angry.
Fucci had a particular fascination with knives, collecting them and often carrying one around with him. He would frequently take out his knife and pretend to stab his girlfriend and slit her throat. He would sometimes even talk about killing her. In fact, less than a month before Fucci murdered Tristan Bailey, he told his friends that he planned to kill a random person by bringing them into the woods and stabbing them with his knife.
In the aftermath of Tristan's murder, information about Fucci's volatile behavior and troubled mind flowed out from sources who had been close with him. The red flags stacked up, indicating that Fucci had been planning and hinting at murdering someone for months before the attack. People seemed to be aware of the threat, yet nothing about his state of mind had surfaced until it was too late. Fucci's friends explained why.
They had never taken his threats and fake knife attacks seriously. They had thought it was all jokes, albeit dark ones. They never fathomed that he would follow through with what they viewed as empty threats. They never expected that he was capable of committing the act that resulted in Tristan's death. As a clear window into the months of Fucci's life leading up to the murder developed, investigators realized their initial diagnosis of the crime as a spur-of-the-moment killing was incorrect.
Fucci had been orchestrating this attack long before the night Tristan was murdered. He had been contemplating such a murder for a long time, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Not long after Fucci's initial arrest, law enforcement adjusted the charges, leveling them up from second-degree murder to first-degree murder because of the obvious premeditation involved in the attack. One chilling fact became apparent throughout the investigation: Fucci had no motive at all for killing Tristan.
He had not decided to kill her that night because of an argument, or because of another emotion such as rejection, anger, or revenge. He had no personal vendetta against Tristan. In fact, he didn't seem to know her particularly well. Fuchi had no reason to kill Tristan. He had seemingly chosen a classmate at random to live out his fantasy and commit his brutal crime, seizing the opportunity the night that he and Tristan snuck out of their homes.
Fucci, who had obtained Tristan's number the night of her murder, had convinced Tristan to sneak out to Absher's house. He had managed to get her outside, alone with him, in the middle of the night, pretending to be her friend, someone who she could trust, who she knew from school and the neighborhood. He lured her to a remote area of the community. There, he attacked her just to experience the thrill of murdering someone. He had wanted to know what it would feel like to take a life.
there was no other reason for her murder. Tristan just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and, as a result, ended up becoming the victim of Fucci's demented fantasy come to life. Fucci would remain in juvenile detention for almost two years after his arrest, awaiting what promised to be a graphic and painful trial. Yet even in jail, his true colors became even more apparent. In the months leading up to his trial,
Fucci spent his time in jail getting into violent altercations and exchanging threatening remarks with both fellow inmates and guards in the detention center where he was being held. On multiple occasions, he got into fights with inmates and made a habit of intimidating and bullying other teens held in jail with him, forcing them to hand over their items to him. He bragged to fellow inmates about his own crime, taking pride in having the guts to stab a girl while face to face with her,
which he viewed as more of an accomplishment than taking someone's life with a gun. Turning his crime into a scare tactic, he used what he had done to threaten to stab and kill other inmates, bullying them into doing what he wanted. He also threatened officers guarding the cells of his detention center, claiming in several instances that he would kill them and their families.
Several times, he was sprayed by guards with chemical restraint and transferred into an isolation cell to restrain him from fighting with and harming other inmates, guards, and even himself. Even as violent, combative behavior and disturbing comments continued beyond the murder, Fucci stuck with his not guilty plea for nearly two years until the trial loomed. Part 4: The Long-Awaited Trial Commences
In early February 2023, the trial for the murder of Tristan Bailey was just around the corner. Because of the brutality and eerie premeditation of the crime, he was set to be tried as an adult. It had been a long 21 months since the slaying, and Fucci, now 16 years old, had stood by his not guilty plea despite strong evidence suggesting otherwise.
However, just before jury selection began, Fucci changed his tune, flipping the not guilty plea he had insisted on maintaining for many months to a guilty plea for the charge of first-degree murder. A sentencing hearing commenced, highlighting many of the graphic and difficult facts of the crime.
In March, Tristan's siblings made emotional statements during the hearing, with one of her sisters taking the stand to drop 114 teal heart-shaped stones into a glass jar to visually and powerfully signify how many times Fuchi had stabbed her sister. Tristan's family members indicated that they desperately wanted to see justice served for Tristan and felt that the only verdict that would fulfill this would be life in prison for Fuchi.
Fucci, likely in an attempt to achieve a truncated sentence, finally made an effort to display some remorse for the crime he committed. In a letter that he wrote to the court that was revealed during the trial, Fucci apologized for his actions, saying that he was sorry for the pain he caused Tristan's family and friends, and that he was sorry for stripping her from their lives at such an early age. However, the Bailey family and their desire for Fucci to be sentenced to life in prison
remained unmoved, even in light of the letter. Tristan's father described Fucci's letter as insincere and viewed it as a ploy that Fucci and his team were using to garner sympathy in court. He did not believe that Fucci truly regretted his actions. Several bold family members of Fucci's, including his grandmother and his mother, spoke or sent in letters on behalf of him, begging for mercy during sentencing.
They claimed that they believed that Fucci was not all evil and that, even after what he had done, could be saved. However, the support for Tristan was overwhelming, with more than 150 letters pouring into the court on her behalf from those who knew her while she was alive. Finally, on March 24th, the judge issued a sentencing verdict. It seemed Fucci's attempts at remorse, whether they were genuine or not, had been too little and too late.
Fucci's age allowed him to dodge the death penalty, as capital punishment is not allowed for minors in the state of Florida. But the judge sentenced him to the maximum possible sentence: life in prison, without the potential for review until he had served at least 25 years of his sentence. As Fucci learned his fate, he remained emotionless in the courtroom.
As the judge delivered his sentence, he did not hold back from describing his reasoning for delivering the maximum sentence in detail. Any adjustment that Fucci had attempted to show in his recent behavior was far from enough to compensate for the pain he had inflicted through his past actions. The judge, who claimed that this was the most shocking case he had seen and presided over in his three decades of working in the region,
credited the harsh sentence to the brutality of the crime and the immense impact Tristan's death had on her grieving family and the community around her. He also pointed out Fucci's lack of remorse following the incident and the lack of motive for the crime. Fucci had simply acted on a twisted desire to feel the thrill of taking the life of another human being. Fucci was not the only one in his family under criminal scrutiny following the crime.
Less than two months after he was sentenced to life in prison, Fucci's mother herself underwent a sentencing hearing, wrapping up the final segment of a long, challenging, nightmarish wait for the Bailey family. On that fateful Mother's Day two years before, Fucci's mother, Crystal Smith, had found the jeans he had been wearing during the atrocious attack.
Amid the search for Tristan Bailey, Smith had found suspicious substances on her son's jeans. Later, the substance was revealed to have been blood based on DNA testing. Smith's discovery came at a point in the case when she already knew that something suspicious and potentially criminal had occurred.
On the day that the police were chasing down leads regarding the whereabouts of Tristan Bailey, Smith was present for her son's initial questioning by authorities, when he was still a witness, not a suspect, in the investigation. However, Smith's subsequent actions indicate that perhaps she suspected something was afoot and that her son might have been involved. After Fucci left the house with law enforcement officials to show them where he claimed he last saw Tristan,
Smith headed to her son's bedroom and found the pair of jeans he had been wearing the previous night. Although Smith knew Tristan was missing and that Fucci was the last known person to see her alive, she cleaned and scrubbed the jeans in an attempt to wash what appeared to be blood out of an item that would later serve as valuable evidence in the case. As a result of her actions that day, which seemed to be an effort to hide her son's potential involvement in Tristan's disappearance and murder,
the police accused Smith of tampering with evidence. Like her son did weeks before, Smith opted to forgo a trial, instead pleading no contest to the charge against her. She walked away from the hearing with a sentence of 30 days of jail time and five years of probation.
Though several years have passed since the murder of Tristan Bailey, the effects of Fucci's crime still reverberate through the community, having shattered the hearts of many of Tristan's family and friends. After Fucci's sentencing, the Bailey family pointed to what they hoped people would remember in the years following the murder and trial: Tristan's bright, outgoing personality and her legacy as a good, positive friend and teammate.
To move toward this goal and commemorate Tristan's life, the Bailey family launched the Tristan Bailey Memorial Fund, an organization designed to have a positive effect on the community and beyond. The Memorial Fund has several objectives dedicated to what Tristan cared about. The organization funds scholarships for higher education to ensure students can gain the education they need, and it focuses on advocating for victims of crimes as well as their families.
In light of the Bailey family's drawn-out criminal law and media journey after Tristan's death, they decided to allocate a portion of the fund to helping victims of crimes and their families make it through the prosecution and media process in the aftermath of a crime.
The fund also focuses on supporting children in learning self-defense and teaching both parents and children how to avoid the dangers of social media to ensure that social media users do not become victims or victimize someone else online. As for Fucci, he built his own form of legacy in the murder and aftermath of his crime, unlike Tristan, who will be remembered for her upbeat personality at school and in her community.
Fuchi will go down in history as an infamous figure, known for his heartless, emotionless, and unprompted killing. Fuchi will remain in prison for the foreseeable future, unable to kill again and unable to subject another person to his demented fantasies of murder.
