When police interviewed Jean Charles in May about what he did the day before his son was found naked and strangled to death on an embankment in New Kensington, he told them he went to work, visited a food pantry and wandered around Market Square in Downtown.
Although Mr. Charles, 40, told investigators he was homeless and spent most of his evenings sleeping in parks and under overpasses, investigators found security videos taken in the morning hours of May 4 that showed him walking from Tarentum to Brackenridge, where he rented an apartment, police wrote in a criminal complaint.
While police waited to obtain a search warrant for Mr. Charles’ Brackenridge Avenue apartment, a detective looked around a nearby abandoned building. There was a mud-stained, olive-green hoodie and black pants behind the property, the detective wrote in the complaint.
The outfit matched the description of the clothes worn by a man who was caught on a security camera holding a shovel and pushing a bicycle in the area of Dent and Haser drives in New Kensington around 3:06 a.m. on May 4. The intersection is just down the road from where police found the body of Mr. Charles' son, 9-year-old Azuree Charles.
DNA testing on the clothes found in Brackenridge provided a match for Mr. Charles, a criminal complaint says. A shovel, found in a garbage can on Haser Drive, also had his DNA on it, police said.
Mr. Charles was charged Wednesday with homicide, abuse of a corpse, concealing the death of a child and other crimes in connection to his son’s death. Azuree’s mother, Luella Elien, 29, of New Kensington, was charged with aggravated assault and endangering children in the case.
According to court paperwork, police began investigating the case on the morning of May 4, when Azuree was reported missing by his mother.
Initially, Ms. Elien told police on May 4 that it had been months since Mr. Charles had been at her residence on Haser Drive, where she lived with Azuree and her three younger daughters.
But she recanted, police said, and told them that she left her children in Mr. Charles’ care on April 30 despite his multiple instances of alleged child abuse, which resulted in a November 2021 order from the Westmoreland County Children’s Bureau that prohibited him from having unsupervised contact with any of his children.
Criminal complaints filed by investigators do not detail her whereabouts between May 1 and May 4, but they say Ms. Elien confirmed that she last saw her son in his room around 8 p.m. on May 3. When she awoke in the morning, she told police, she discovered her security camera in a glass of water.
She said she also found ketchup all over Azuree’s room and a metal gasoline can in his bed. When she saw his bicycle was gone, she reported him missing, she told police.
Detectives at the home saw that the child’s bedroom was cleaned of the ketchup, the gas can had been moved and all the bed linens had been washed in a washing machine.
“A mop and mop bucket were observed near the doorway of Azuree’s bedroom,” investigators wrote in the complaint.
A detective searched the neighborhood and found a set of footprints and bicycle tire tracks leading to where security cameras captured the man, alleged to be Mr. Charles, pushing what appeared to police to be Azuree’s bicycle.
The detective was then notified that Azuree’s body had been found along a wooded area near Ms. Elien’s Haser Drive residence.
The boy was naked, caked in mud and partially covered by a foam cooler and old lawn furniture, the complaint says. His pajamas, wet and muddy, were hanging on the low branches of a nearby tree.
As police canvassed the neighborhood, a Haser Drive resident told an officer that he found a shovel in his garbage can that did not belong to him. Later testing would show DNA found on the shovel was a match for Mr. Charles, the complaint says.
At the time of his May 4 interview with homicide investigators, Mr. Charles had just been taken into custody on a different, outstanding warrant. Court paperwork shows he was facing charges of simple assault and endangering the welfare of children in connection to an alleged Nov. 17, 2021, assault against Azuree.
Police asked him about his whereabouts between the morning of May 3 and his arrest the next day. He told them that he went to work, visited a free food pantry in Brackenridge and took a bus to New Kensington, where he changed clothes in a garage.
He stated he then walked to a park in Aspinwall before walking to Market Square in Downtown Pittsburgh, where he spent an “unknown amount of time,” the complaint reads. Mr. Charles claimed he was riding a bus heading towards Aspinwall around 6 a.m. on May 4 when he received a call from Ms. Elien stating that Azuree was missing.
Authorities laid out a different story in their affidavit. They wrote that surveillance video recorded around 5:47 a.m. on May 4 “clearly showed” Mr. Charles, wearing an olive-green hoodie and black pants, walking near Fourth Avenue in Tarentum towards Brackenridge. Investigators tracked his movements to the apartment on Brackenridge Avenue.
A review of phone records also showed Mr. Charles made a phone call to his employer around 6:17 a.m. that day. Police determined the call was placed in the Brackenridge area based on the cell tower the phone connected to, the complaint says.
On May 9, detectives interviewed a juvenile who lives on Haser Drive and said he was awake watching television around 2:30 a.m. on May 4 when he heard Azuree screaming, “No no no, I’m sorry!”
The juvenile said he went back to bed because the yelling scared him. He heard no more noises after that, the complaint says.
Court records do not list an attorney for Ms. Elien or Mr. Charles, both of whom are jailed in the Westmoreland County Prison. Ms. Elien’s bail was set at $50,000.
Mr. Charles was denied bail due to charges of criminal homicide, court records state.
The parents are scheduled for preliminary hearings on Oct. 12 in front of District Judge Frank J. Pallone Jr.
Mick Stinelli: mstinelli@post-gazette.com
First Published: September 22, 2022, 7:25 p.m.
Updated: September 23, 2022, 12:04 p.m.
