Two Louisiana teens were charged Friday with the murder of an Arizona teacher who went missing four months ago, after police found his remains after searching a landfill for 48 days.
Junseok Chae was reported missing on March 25 when he did not return home from work at Arizona State University and his car was found just a week later in Louisiana.
Javian Ezell and Gabrielle Austin, both 18, were charged in connection with their murder on Friday after they, and an unidentified third person, were caught driving the teacher’s vehicle on March 30.
Her statements to police led officers to believe that Chae had been killed and that the hunt at the landfill began on May 11.
However, it took 48 more days for investigators to find her body, after a search that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with an average of 15 people per day going through the site.
The body of Arizona State University professor Junseok Chae was found at the Northwest Regional Landfill on July 17, nearly 4 months after his disappearance.
Javian Ezell (pictured right) and Gabrielle Austin (pictured left), both 18, were extradited to Arizona from Louisiana and charged with murder on Friday. A reason is not clear
Chae’s body was found during a search here at the Northwest Regional Landfill in Arizona.
The human remains were finally discovered on July 17 at the Northwest Regional Landfill and identified as the Professor.
The motive for his murder, and the manner of his death, have not been revealed.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was first alerted to teens after receiving a police call in Shreveport, Louisiana, on March 30.
Officers responded to a “suspicious” vehicle call and found the suspects and the third person in what they later discovered was the professor’s car.
After speaking with Ezell and Austin, police believed that Chae had been killed in Maricopa County, and the investigation found “various pieces of evidence” there.
Further investigation found that he was killed near Carefree Highway and Seventh Street.
According to ABC News, authorities believed that Chae’s body had been placed in a garbage container that was later transferred to the landfill.
In the image, the Northwest Regional Landfill, located in Surprise, Arizona. The professor’s remains were found here four months after he was reported missing in March.
Police conducted a 48-day search of the site that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There was an average of 15 people per day working on the dump search
Their suspicions seemed confirmed when they began searching for the remains there on May 11 and were met with ‘related evidence’.
However, it took more than a month to find his body.
According to Central Arizona, the 48-day search at the landfill cost the sheriff’s office $ 304,000.
They had mounted a search for 15 people every day, working for approximately 10 hours.
Junseok Chae was a successful academic and had four patents.
“I continue to be impressed by the hard work of our deputies,” Sheriff Penzone said in a statement.
‘Your perseverance in an extremely complex and demanding case will now allow the victim’s family to be closed to what has surely been a difficult period. Research efforts to recover a body from a landfill are rarely successful. ”
Ezell and Austin were recently extradited from Louisiana to Arizona to face their charges and on Friday they were charged with first-degree murder, armed robbery and vehicle theft.
His bond was set at $ 1 million each.
Chae was an accomplished academic and educator.
According to his biography on the university’s website, he graduated from the University of Korea in Seoul in 1998.
He then received two advanced degrees from the University of Michigan before joining ASU as a professor in 2005 at the School of Electrical, Cimpoter and Energy Engineering.
Among his accomplishments, Chae had four patents, had published more than 150 scholarly articles, and had written a book.
“We are saddened by the loss of ASU community member Junseok Chae,” the university said in a statement.
‘Our deepest condolences to Professor Chae’s family and friends.
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