Alonzo Brooks
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The night of April 3rd, 2004, a storm came into town. A few friends decided to leave the city and head into rural America. Everyone came home that night except the black kid in an all-white neighborhood. The next morning, the family goes to the party house. No one lives there. There's no sign of Alonzo. But his friends do find his boots.

This is Forensic Tales, episode number 94. The story of Alonzo Brooks. ♪♪

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

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or by simply clicking the support link in the show notes. You can also help support the show by leaving us a positive rating with a review. Please continue to tell your friends and family who love true crime about us. I genuinely appreciate your support. Now, let's jump right into this week's case. When someone dies, a forensic pathologist has five options to select as a cause of death.

These options are natural, accident, suicide, homicide, and undetermined. Some jurisdictions even have a sixth option as quote pending until they can determine the correct cause of death. Four out of five causes of death are pretty self-explanatory. Natural, typically when someone dies of old age or some sort of terminal illness. Accident, like a fall or a car crash.

Suicide. Someone decides to take their own life. Homicide. A person becomes the victim of foul play. But the fifth option isn't as straightforward. Undetermined. We don't know why someone died. It's hard to know exactly how many undetermined deaths happen each year in the United States. It seems like this would be a relatively straightforward number that is trackable.

But because of inconsistent coding and record-keeping across the country, it's hard to say how many deaths are ruled undetermined. But if you ask me, one undetermined death is one too many. Undetermined means that a forensic pathologist was unable to say for sure how someone died.

Imagine it's your loved one who's passed away, and nobody can tell you whether they died naturally, if they killed themselves, or something else happened to them. Their death will forever be undetermined. On Saturday, April 3rd, 2004, 23-year-old Alonzo Brooks from Gardner, Kansas, told his mom that he was going to a party that night with a couple of his buddies.

The party was to celebrate one of Alonzo's acquaintances leaving for the military. It was supposed to be a going-away party where many young people got together to wish him off. Alonzo got dressed in a pair of blue jeans, a t-shirt, a sweater, and a hat, his go-to outfit. Typically, Alonzo wore two pairs of socks, but on this particular night, he only put on one pair.

He had hurt his ankle playing basketball a couple days earlier and was limping, so he only wore one pair of socks that night. Alonzo's mom, Maria Ramirez, kissed her son goodbye and told him to have fun at the party, that she would see him later on when he got home. Alonzo and his friends stood outside his home deciding on driving arrangements.

Finally, Alonzo decides to hitch a ride with one of his friends, Justin Sprague, and his two other friends, Daniel Foon and Tyler Bogard, decided to drive to the party separately. The party was 47 miles away from Gardner in the small country town of Laseen, Kansas.

So it took Alonzo and his buddies a little over an hour to get to the city, which is a very rural part of Linn County. And it's what many people would describe as being, quote, in the middle of the country. The last census reported a population of just over 1,000 people. So it was a much different place from where Alonzo and his friends were coming from.

The group arrives at the party where there's already about 30, 40, maybe 50 people there. People range from about 16 years old to maybe 21. Alonzo, being 23 years old at the time, was one of the oldest people there. He jumps out of his friend Justin's car and yells out, "'Who wants a beer?'

Alonzo and his friends split up when they get inside the home. Some of his friends went to go play beer pong or flip cup, and some went to go play cards. Everyone at the house party seemed to be having a good time. It was your typical young person type party where you've got drinking games and dancing.

Everyone in Alonzo's group of friends seemed to be having fun until one of his friends noticed that Alonzo was arguing with another young guy in the living room. Now, his friend didn't know what exactly they were fighting about. All he could tell was that if he didn't go over there and break it up, things would escalate between Alonzo and this guy.

He knows that this guy is white and his friend Alonzo is black. In fact, Alonzo was one of the only black people at the party that night. So this friend goes over there and tells his friend Alonzo to just chill and to walk away from this guy before they get into a physical fight. And Alonzo listens and he decides to go just to another part of the house and everything seems to be okay at that point.

About an hour and a half later, around 11 p.m., a couple of Alonzo's friends decided to go to another house party that night. So unfortunately, they were leaving Alonzo and his friend Justin behind at this house party. But that was okay because Justin was Alonzo's ride home. A little while later, Justin and Alonzo went outside to smoke a cigarette. But when they got outside, they realized that they were out.

So Justin tells Alonzo that he's just going to hop in his car, drive to the local gas station to pick up some more cigarettes. He was leaving Alonzo behind at the party.

On his way to the gas station, Justin makes a wrong turn. Remember, they're about 50 miles away from home in the country. He has no idea where he is. He has no idea where the gas station is. So he ends up driving about 30 minutes in the wrong direction and gets his car stuck in a ditch.

He decides to call up another friend who's at the house party and have him tell Alonzo that he got lost and wasn't going to make it back to the party. He decided that he was just going to go home and call it a night. So while on the phone with his friend, Adam, he asks Adam if he can give Alonzo a ride home that night. And then Justin drives home.

The following day on April 4th, Alonzo's mom Maria receives a phone call from one of her son's friends asking if he was home. So she puts the phone down and walks into Alonzo's bedroom, expecting to find him asleep in bed. But when she opens the door, Alonzo isn't there. So she decides to go down into the basement, but he isn't there either. Maria starts calling her son's friends to see if any of them know where he is.

It wasn't like him not to come home or at least check in with his mom and let her know if he wasn't planning to stay there. But none of Alonzo's friends have any idea where he is. Not even the friends who were with him the night before at the party. Alonzo's mom finds out from Justin that he was supposed to get a ride home with their friend Adam.

So she calls Adam, but when he says that he didn't give him a ride home that night and that he left the party without Alonzo. A couple of Alonzo's friends decide to drive back up to La Sing to see if they can find him. Maybe he drank a little too much and passed out somewhere near the party.

As the friends get to the house, they park their car at the property's long driveway entrance. Then, they get out of the car and start looking around. That's when they discover something strange. Right there on the highway, leading up to the driveway, they find one of Alonzo's boots and his hat. And a couple yards down the road, they find the second boot.

So it's clear to the group of friends that something terrible has happened to their friend. Alonzo Tyree Brooks was born on May 21, 1980, to parents Billy Brooks and Maria Ramirez. Before moving to Gardner, Kansas with his mom, he was the youngest of five children and grew up in Topeka, Kansas.

Nicknamed Zoe, Alonzo was extremely close with his mom. Maybe it was because he was the youngest of five siblings and that he was the baby of the family. His family described him as a shy and quiet kid, but who was always polite and sweet to anyone that he met. He was just a sweet, sweet kid growing up.

As a teenager and young adult, his favorite color was red. He was always wearing red and black and would often be seen wearing a beanie right down to his eyelids. In school, Alonzo was a star football player. He was the type of kid who could tackle you hard to the ground during a game, but then about an hour later, he could sit next to you and play video games.

The friends decided to call his mom Maria and tell her about finding Alonzo's boots and hat. They tell her that they found the boots, but that there was no sign of Alonzo. Maria hung up the phone and immediately called the Gardner Police Department. But the police department said that she needed to wait a minimum of 48 hours before she could report her son missing.

Because Alonzo was 23 years old, he was legally an adult. There was nothing the police could do and basically told her that she needed to wait at least two days before he would be considered a missing person. But Maria isn't satisfied with what the police are telling her. And she knows that this isn't like her son. Plus, why would he be somewhere without his boots and hat?

The following day, on Monday, April 5th, Maria called Alonzo's older brother, Billy Brooks Jr., to tell him that she hasn't seen or heard from Alonzo since Saturday night. His friends found his boots and hats along a highway near a house party he attended. So Billy Brooks Jr. and his wife decided to drive to the house party in Los Ingos. They wanted to see if they could find any sign of his little brother.

They tracked down the house property's owner and found out that the house was like a rental house. It was empty, and no one was technically living there at the time. When they arrived at the property, they came upon an empty house with a huge field in the back. There was also a creek that ran alongside of the property.

Alonzo's older brother and sister-in-law drove down different roads throughout town looking for any sign of him, but nothing. Alonzo was nowhere to be found.

They eventually stopped at the local sheriff's department and asked to speak to the sheriff directly. But the sheriff kept telling them that there wasn't anything they could do. Like the police department up in Gardner, the sheriff said that Alonzo was 23 years old and that he was an adult. And until he was gone for a couple more days, there wasn't anything they could do.

The only thing the sheriff said was that maybe Alonzo got a little too drunk that night and tried walking home from the party. Now, this theory might be a possible explanation, except for the fact that it rained the night before. And that meant that he would have had to walk with no shoes and no hat. Plus, the party was 47 miles away from his home in Gardner.

so he wasn't going to try and walk home, no matter how drunk he may have been. Alonzo was still missing by Wednesday, April 7th, and the local police turned over the case to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, or KBI.

Within a couple of days of opening the investigation, the KBI launched a massive search of the property where Alonzo was last seen. And when I say massive, I mean massive. Over 40 agents with the KBI were assigned to the investigation, and they brought in search and scent dogs to search the property. They used dozens of helicopters to conduct aerial searches.

They were doing whatever they could to find any evidence that would point them in the right direction to locate Alonzo. But the initial search turned up nothing. Three days later, on April 10th, the FBI joined the KBI's investigation after rumors were swirling that Alonzo may have become a victim of a hate crime.

From the get-go, race was at the center of this investigation. Lawsing, the town where Alonzo and his friends attended the house party that night, was a basically all-white community. And like I mentioned earlier, Alonzo was one of the only black people at the party that night, and the rest of the kids were white. This part of Kansas is very rural. It's country. There aren't many people of different races just walking up and down the streets of this city.

So where Alonzo is from, Gardner, Kansas, that's an area that is much more urban. Several of Alonzo's friends told the KPI that the N-word was used several times throughout the night and that Alonzo was seen flirting with a white girl at the party, which some could have argued that maybe some of the partygoers didn't agree with this.

So this information caused many to speculate that whatever happened to Alonzo was somehow racially motivated. On April 12th, a search and rescue dive team is brought in to search the creek that's right behind the property. The team consisted of nine highly trained divers specialized in recovering human bodies from large bodies of water.

The plan was to have three divers go down the middle of the creek and put three divers on each side. Now, this particular creek wasn't very big, and it was only about three feet deep in the deepest part.

So with nine highly specialized divers, it wasn't going to take much more than a couple of hours to clear the entire area. And if Alonzo was there, if he was in the creek, they would find him. But after a couple of hours of searching, their attempts came up empty. Alonzo was not in the creek.

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This episode of Forensic Tales is sponsored by How I Died. How I Died is a fiction podcast with a full cast of voice actors. The series follows John Spacer, a forensic pathologist who solves murders by speaking to the dead. Except no one knows about John's gift and he has to hide it from his boss, who is an untrusting sheriff who is always looking over his shoulder.

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I highly recommend you subscribe and listen to How I Died, available wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's How I Died. Subscribe today and give them a listen. By April 15th, Alonzo had been missing for 11 days, and the hopes of finding him safe and alive were starting to fade.

By this point in the investigation, the KBI and FBI had interviewed hundreds of people. They interviewed all of Alonzo's friends and family. They spoke with everyone who attended the party that night. They talked to anyone and everyone they could think of who might know something about where he could be.

Now, in some cases, investigators even administered polygraphs during these interviews. But no one seemed to really know anything and nobody knew where Alonzo was or where he went when he left the party that night. The only theory that the KBI and FBI had was that Alonzo left the party on his own.

No eyewitnesses remembered seeing him leave that night. No one saw him go with anyone in particular. So their best guess and their best theory was that sometime during the night, Alonzo left the house and decided that he would walk home after drinking.

Now, we already know that his original ride home, Justin, left the party after getting lost on his way to go pick up cigarettes and that his other friend, Adam, was supposed to take him home that night but didn't. So the police's theory was that maybe Alonzo realized that he didn't have a ride home for whatever reason and decided that he would walk home or maybe start walking and hitch a ride somewhere.

But there's a couple problems with this theory. Number one, Alonzo was almost 50 miles away from home. That's an insane distance to try and think that you're just going to be able to walk out the door and walk home.

even if you've been drinking. But okay, let's speculate for a moment. Let's say that he did decide to walk home that night. There's another problem. His friends found both of his boots and hats within a few yards of each other along the highway right in front of the house party. If Alonzo was walking home, why did he take off both his boots?

Let's also stop there for a moment. At the beginning of the episode, I mentioned that Alonzo hurt his ankle a couple days before the party playing basketball. According to his friends and mother, he was walking with a slight limp because he hurt his ankle. He twisted it. So not only does he have a 50-mile walk ahead of him back to Gardner, but he's also got a very hurt ankle. He's limping.

And then finally, it rained the night of the party. It rained heavily. This meant that if he was walking, he did so without shoes, without a hat, with a hurt ankle, in the rain, and no one saw him. From the start of this investigation, Alonzo's family and friends were not permitted by the police to search the property.

After the KBI and FBI got involved, the police told the family to stay away from the house altogether, that it was their investigation and that the entire property was considered an active crime scene. It wasn't until May 1st, 27 days after Alonzo went missing, that his family was finally allowed to come search the property themselves.

So on May 1st, Alonzo's family and friends organized a search party to search the wooded areas and creek next to the property. Although the FBI and KBI conducted aerial and land searches as well as water searches of the location, the family still wanted to do their part and look for any signs that might help the investigation. So they break the group up into smaller search parties of two to three people each.

The plan is to have the smaller groups canvas the entire area, starting from the front of the property and making their way back towards the end. A few hours into the search, a volunteer spots a white shed towards the back of the wooded area. As she approached the white shed, she saw something that caught her attention. They found Alonzo Brooks.

The volunteer announces to Alonzo's uncle over the radio that they found him. Finally, after 27 days of searching, he's been found dead.

After Alonzo's body was discovered, the KBI and FBI arrived back at the property. They're quick to tell the media, as well as Alonzo's family, that they did search that same exact area where his body was found, but when they searched, they didn't find anything.

So according to the FBI and KBI, they believed that his body was placed in the wooded area behind the home after they conducted their searches of the site. Because according to the KBI and FBI, there was just no way that their investigators would have missed him.

One of the theories the police suggest is that the creek may have carried Alonzo's body downstream to the spot where the volunteers found him. That would explain why they missed him on their initial search of the area. But Alonzo's family disagreed with the police. They don't believe that he floated down the creek.

According to the family, all of Alonzo's personal possessions found on him were in almost perfect condition. None of these items looked like they had been floating in the water for several days or several weeks. They even pointed to the fact that Alonzo had a paper on him. It was a note that was found completely dry. This note did not look like it had been in the water.

So according to the family, the FBI and KBI's theory that Alonzo floated downstream to where his body ended up didn't really make much sense. Instead, the family believed that someone, not the Creek, moved Alonzo's body and placed it where volunteers ultimately discovered him after the police searched the area.

While the FBI and the family were at odds with how Alonzo's body ended up where it was, his body was sent for an autopsy. Dr. Eric Mitchell was the forensic pathologist who performed Alonzo's autopsy. His first observation was the level of decomposition to the body. It was apparent that Alonzo likely died nearly one month earlier when he was last seen at the party.

Because it had been 27 days, his body was experiencing high levels of decomposition. This can make performing an autopsy extremely difficult for forensic pathologists. Decomposition changes how our bodies look from the time of death until the autopsy is performed.

This change can distort tissue, and even in advanced stages of decompositions, our organs may be absent. In Alonzo's case, his level of decomposition made it problematic to find any, quote, penetrating injuries to his body.

This means that the pathologist couldn't find any notable injuries to his body. He couldn't find any gunshot wounds. There was no stab wounds noted, and none of his bones were broken. Therefore, there wasn't anything on Alonzo's body to suggest that he was physically injured, resulting in his death.

Now, this doesn't mean that there weren't any injuries. This just means that because of the stage of decomposition he was in, the forensic pathologist couldn't see any obvious signs of any physical injuries. Now, the forensic pathologist also couldn't determine whether or not Alonzo had been strangled.

If he couldn't find any penetrating injuries on the body, the next obvious conclusion would be that someone strangled him. But he couldn't solve that puzzle either. Animals had gotten to his body in the woods.

These animals specifically targeted the soft tissue around Alonzo's neck, making it next to impossible for the forensic pathologist to determine whether or not he had been strangled. The animals basically ate away all of the outer tissue and skin that would have indicated if there was any type of bruising or any other type of marks on his neck to indicate strangulation.

So at this point, the pathologist has basically nothing to go on. He can't find any injuries to his body. He wasn't shot. He wasn't stabbed. He can't tell whether or not someone strangled him. He has no broken bones. The list goes on and on about the things the pathologist couldn't find and

But at the end of the day, he couldn't find a single piece of forensic evidence to suggest that Alonzo was a victim of foul play or not. And because everything else has been ruled out as a possible cause of death, Dr. Eric Mitchell had basically no choice but to report Alonzo's cause of death as undetermined and manner of death as undetermined.

In other words, in simple words, they didn't have enough evidence to say whether or not Alonzo was killed.

Now, not surprisingly, the forensic pathologist's ruling of undetermined outraged Alonzo's family, who all along believed that someone murdered their son, that this was some sort of racially motivated hate crime. They didn't believe that their 23-year-old son would just simply walk away from a party and decide that he was going to go walk home 50 miles in the rain with no shoes on.

At the end of the day, they strongly believed that their son was a victim of foul play, even if there wasn't enough forensic evidence. So this battle, this huge battle between Alonzo's family and the autopsy findings caught the attention of the Internet.

People from all over the world were talking about this case online, on Reddit, on true crime blogs and message boards. I can't tell you how many of them I found while researching this case. Internet sleuths from all over joined the internet chatter about what could have caused Alonzo's death, from his death being somehow involved in a drug trade to his death being a hate crime.

Some of these theories swirling around the internet seemed plausible, but at the same time, others were just plain crazy. One of the theories discussed on the internet and by Alonzo's family was this idea that he was placed in some sort of freezer after his death.

If his body was placed in a freezer for a few weeks, this could explain two things. Number one, it could explain why his body wasn't as badly decomposed as you'd expect.

Remember, when the police turned over all of his personal items to his mom, these items were in almost perfect condition. And when I say personal items, I'm referring to his wallet. His wallet still had his money, ID, and credit cards. He had papers on him. He even had his card to go rent videos at a local video store.

All of these items that were inside of his pockets that night were in near perfect condition. They weren't in the type of condition that you would maybe expect to see if his body had floated downstream like the police suggested or if his body was lying in this wooded area for weeks with animals.

And then number two, if Alonzo's body was kept in a freezer or was frozen after someone killed him or he died, this would explain why the KBI and FBI didn't find his body during their initial search of the area. Remember, the investigators were adamant that they searched the same exact area where the volunteer search party found his body.

So if Alonzo was being kept in a freezer somewhere, that could explain why his body was dumped where volunteers found him after the police searched the same area. But why? Why would someone kill Alonzo and place his body in a freezer? Well, this is mere speculation on my part.

But one possible explanation could be that after he was killed, whoever killed him didn't know what to do with his body. So they put it in a freezer or somewhere cold and then decided after three to four weeks of hiding his body that they would dump it and get rid of it.

Or maybe this person or persons had information, inside information, that the police had already searched this particular part of the wooded area behind the home and that once they knew the police did their search of the area and they left, that these individuals or individual would go out there and then dump the body, again, knowing that the police already searched there and weren't likely going to go back.

But again, these are just theories. But these are theories that could explain why Alonzo's body was possibly frozen or if he was killed. But the biggest obstacle to this argument that Alonzo was frozen post-mortem is the forensic pathologist report. In his report, he couldn't determine whether he'd been frozen or not.

it's challenging for forensic pathologists to figure out if a person had been frozen or not, whether before death or after death. If a person is discovered immediately after being frozen, it is possible that the pathologist can observe subtle changes at the microscopic level that indicate the person was frozen. But chances are these changes, again, at the microscopic level are so small that

That the pathologist isn't able to even detect them and therefore isn't able to determine beyond a reasonable doubt here whether or not someone had been frozen before death or even postmortem. There just isn't enough signs and indicators on our bodies that can tell.

So in this report, in Alonzo's case, this pathologist said that he couldn't prove and he couldn't disprove the family and the Internet's theory that Alonzo was placed in a freezer after death. Now, there was no question that Alonzo died under very suspicious circumstances. But after months and years of investigating his death,

The KBI and FBI were no closer to solving the case. They conducted hundreds of interviews and poured over every ounce of evidence, but they continued to find themselves back at square one. They had no idea how Alonzo died, and they had no idea if someone murdered him or not. So after years of investigating, the case turned cold.

By 2019, nearly 15 years after Alonzo's death, the KBI released a statement about the case. In their statement to the media, they said, quote, no evidence or information gained throughout the lengthy investigation indicated that Alonzo Brooks was the victim of a crime. And for this reason, the investigation into his death was closed, end quote.

In 2020, there was another big update in the investigation, and it was all because of a Netflix documentary that highlighted Alonzo Brooks' case. On July 1st, 2020, the Netflix series Unsolved Mysteries released an episode titled No Ride Home featuring Alonzo's story. And right away, the series brought his case back to the forefront of everyone's mind.

Because his case caught everyone's attention, federal investigators agreed to exhume Alonzo's body so that a second autopsy could be performed. His body was taken to Dover Air Force so that the federal officials could examine his body a second time. During the second examination, the pathologist discovered injuries on Alonzo's body that were not found in the first autopsy.

The forensic pathologist from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kansas City Division, looked at injuries to parts of Alonzo's body that this particular pathologist concluded were not consistent with normal decomposition patterns. Now, that's all the information we have, and that's all the FBI has said about these injuries.

But based on these new findings, based on the second autopsy, the FBI has decided to reopen Alonzo's case and his death has officially been ruled a homicide. Now that Alonzo's death is reported as a homicide, the investigation starts over. It's now an active homicide investigation.

The FBI has declined to detail what exactly these injuries are. All we know for sure is that the FBI believes he was murdered. The FBI now offers a $100,000 reward for any information about Alonzo Brooks' murder. Over the last year, federal officials have re-interviewed many witnesses who attended the party that night.

According to an article by the New York Times, they've also collected new physical and forensic evidence in the case. Authorities are still operating under the assumption that his death is a possible hate crime. The FBI and Alonzo's family are incredibly hopeful that even after 15 long years, Alonzo's killer will finally be identified.

It's all thanks to forensic evidence identified in the second autopsy that we may ultimately bring a killer to justice. To share your thoughts on the story of Alonzo Brooks, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at Forensic Tales. To check out photos from the case, be sure to head to our website, ForensicTales.com.

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Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please join me next week. We'll have a brand new case and a brand new story to talk about. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.

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