“On Prime Crime.”
“I ran outside and called the police and our nightmare started.”
“A teen girl vanishes in the night. All your focus on is finding your daughter. You know, you just want to find your kid, and evil may be right around the corner.”
“You just wish that someone had recognized that they had a ticking time bomb in their midst.”
“Hi there, everybody. I’m Jesse Weber and welcome to Prime Crime. This is where we break down the most high-profile and memorable true crime cases. We cover some truly heinous acts here on the show, and our next story is really no different. But what makes this one especially chilling is the ‘who’ and the ‘why’.”
“It was a very unusual day for us because Stacy and I, as most parents, were typically up early. We were sworn to stay in our room because Tristan and Sophia were going to make breakfast for Stacy for Mother’s Day.”
Mother’s Day, 2021. St. John’s, Florida. What should be a happy time of celebration for the Bailey family becomes a day of terror.
“I walked out and Sophia was making breakfast by herself. And I was like, ‘Where’s Tristan?’ And she’s like, ‘She’s still sleeping.’ And then my son came downstairs. I asked him to go upstairs and to wake up Tristan for breakfast. He came back down and he was like, ‘Mom, listen, I know I’m blind but, like, I didn’t see her up there.’ And then it instantaneously hit me: sheer panic.”
On Saturday, Tristan had, um, a normal family day. She went to dinner with her family. She visited one of her sisters that night. Unbeknownst to the family, she had sort of made some loose plans to hang out with friends later that night. But 13-year-old Tristan Bailey never came home.
“I ran upstairs and went to her room and she wasn’t there. I went to the bathroom. I went to our TV room upstairs. She wasn’t there. Everyone just started running to every single room. I ran outside and called the police, and our nightmare started.”
That sort of started the timeline of law enforcement getting involved and started as a missing child investigation.
“So many times with those types of calls, especially with a teenager, a lot of times it’s a runaway. So they are treated serious until it’s deemed that they aren’t.”
“We had a great dinner with my son, Tristan, and Sophia, and our granddaughter, and then we left dinner and went to see Alexis and her new kittens. I remember, um, Tristan immediately ran into the kitten room. She loves any kind of animal. We went home and I actually was sitting at our dining room table falling asleep, and the three of them—Tegan and Sophia and Tristan—were up and just saying, ‘I love you,’ and got to bed.”
Investigators learned that Tristan left the house after FaceTiming with someone. Her family didn’t know that she had left the house, and she went off with a boy. She went out and went over to a friend’s house by the name of Trey, and his friend, Aiden Fucci, was there, and she hung out at Trey’s house a little bit that night. It soon becomes clear that Tristan leaving her house would have horrifying consequences.
“Mr. Hart, can you tell me what’s going on today?”
“So, I heard there was a missing girl. We see the whole neighborhood’s been a buzz. If you’ve been looking for, the sheriffs have been around, helicopters flying. My wife had mentioned maybe checking in the woods over here along the end of the cul-de-sac, and at the pond, and to the property next to us.”
A neighbor who lived in the community was going to go out for a run, and he knew, you know, there was a missing child. His wife had mentioned to him, you know, “Check the woods at the end of the cul-de-sac.” Kids would go back there and use it for different things, hang out, things like that.
“I finished my run and I walked around through the woods and just a last sweep. And when I came out of the fence at the southern end of the pond, I saw a dead girl there. As soon as I saw her, I stopped and called 911.”
Unfortunately, when she was found, it was very clear it was a homicide.
“At that point, we just knew we had a girl that was, you know… we didn’t know the full extent at all of the number of stab wounds, but it was pretty clear she was stabbed.”
Tristan was stabbed 114 times. Most of the wounds were defensive wounds, so she put up a fight. She fought back.
“It was a bloody, awful crime scene. There wasn’t a lot in the scene, essentially. Um, it was her and some of her personal items and effects, her vape and her cell phone and jewelry, and I think some money there on the ground. No murder weapon or anything right there, but just her, you know, laying in the woods.”
“I actually was in the front yard, and I had a lot of my friends surrounding me. But I remember the police walking up to me and telling me that I needed to go inside with them. And I begged them not to take me inside. I remember collapsing in my front yard, pleading for them not to tell me what I knew was coming. They shared the news. There’s nothing that’s more devastating than that.”
Tristan came from a close-knit family. She was one of five siblings and with two loving parents, and they called themselves the “Bailey 7.”
“Tristan was a 13-year-old, probably average middle school girl. She was a very outgoing, bubbly girl. She was described by everybody I talked to as everyone’s friend.”
“Tristan was just completely and totally vibrant. As a daughter, she was absolutely phenomenal. Our family is so diverse in what their interests were, and she was the common thread that went throughout.”
“She was just somebody that was a bundle of energy, yet also a bundle of love. She was an excellent student, was actually just talking about maybe going on and becoming a doctor. She was starting to get some career aspirations along that path.”
“Tristan was a very active, competitive cheerleader. Cheerleading was her first kind of love.”
“How long you’ve known Tristan?”
“I have a group of friends, which is me, Aiden, and his girlfriend, Zophie. We’re all pretty close.”
“Tristan… I would hang out with her more alone, or with, like, if I had somebody stay in the night, she’d come over and it’d be the three of us.”
“You start looking at anybody in her life. It was very early through her friends that they’re providing, like, anyone that they know that she potentially would have snuck out to be with.”
“During your conversations with her, has she talked recently about wanting to run away?”
“She said that one time after she got caught by her sister. She’s like, ‘Oh my god, I want to run away.'”
“She got caught by her sister, like, sneaking out.”
One of those friends is 14-year-old Trey who went to school with Tristan. He and another boy from school, 14-year-old Aiden Fucci, were believed to be the last ones with Tristan the night she disappeared. Trey was Aiden Fucci’s best friend. Aiden was a classmate of Tristan’s, and they probably knew of each other. Trey knew Tristan and Aiden had seen her with him.
“When did you first meet Aiden and started to be friends with him?”
“I’ve known Aiden for about a year. We became friends within the first five minutes.”
“Can you describe Aiden’s attitude, his personality, his demeanor?”
“Didn’t care about anything. He was a really big pothead. He was really chill.”
Aiden had a history of documented behavioral issues, some academic issues. We found out through talking to his friends that there was a lot of drug use that he was into.
“He had just come to our school. It was not a name that we ever heard in her circle of friends, and they only had one class together. According to the teachers, they didn’t even speak to each other in class.”
That particular night, Aiden wanted her to come over. He didn’t even have her contact information. So he got the information from Trey.
“Hey, I want to invite that girl Tristan over.”
“And then did… What all happened Saturday night?”
“Saturday night, Aiden came over around 8:00, after he got done hanging out with Zophie. So me and him were outside, and then I was like, ‘Aiden, do you want Tristan to come over?’ And he was just like, ‘I don’t care. Sure.’ So I called her, invited her over.”
They all live in the same neighborhood. Tristan left her home unbeknownst to her family and went over to Trey’s house. Her sister caught her sneaking out that night.
“And then she got there, she was freaking out. She was like, ‘Oh my god, she caught me. She’s going to tell my parents.’ And then Aiden’s just like, ‘You’re good. You’re fine. Nothing’s going to happen.'”
And then later that evening, Trey wanted to go to bed, and so he kicked them out of the house.
“I told them to leave. They left, and then I just went back to sleep.”
“Do you know about what time Aiden and Tristan left?”
“Between 1:00 and 1:10.”
“Did they say anything about where they were going to go after they left?”
“I just told him to leave, and then rolled back over and heard the door open, and they both left.”
“What’s the next thing that happened that night?”
“He never texted me, never called me.”
“So you don’t want to talk to us?”
“Told y’all what happened, but I can’t really tell you anymore ’cause I don’t really know what happened.”
It’s Mother’s Day weekend, 2021. St. John’s, Florida. Police are investigating the disappearance of 13-year-old Tristan Bailey who never came home after hanging out with friends late Saturday night. Her body is located the next day near a pond in a wooded area adjacent to the neighborhood where she lived. She had been stabbed a total of 114 times. Police begin their investigation by speaking with the friend she was believed to be with the night she disappeared. Tristan’s friend Trey shed some light on that Sunday morning.
“Woke up around 9:00. I thought Aiden was home, Tristan was home. I called Aiden. I was just like, ‘What happened last night?’ He just said he dropped her off at the front of her neighborhood and he went home.”
“Law enforcement was checked out with them pretty early that morning, I believe 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. They were some of the first names, if not the first.”
“I was like, ‘The cops are on the way to your house.’ I was just like, they were coming to talk to you. That’s when I saw, like, a little bit of panic in his face, just a little bit.”
Police realize they need to speak with Aiden. Maybe he can shed some light on what happened.
“Are you willing to kind of give me a statement about what’s going on?”
“Yeah.”
“So we—we’re at Trey’s house, and then I stayed there till probably, like, 1:50 a.m., and then I was really late to be home. So I just had to leave or else my mom would, like, seriously just kill me.”
“He had changed his story from, you know, ‘I didn’t see her,’ to ‘I saw her and walked her home,’ basically, and then changed it to, ‘Well, we got in an argument and I pushed her down.'”
“We started walking home and then next to, like, where that brick wall starts up there, okay, is where, like, she touched my… and I, like, pushed her off me real hard and then I just, kind of, walked away out of anger.”
“As the day went on and the night went on, we found more and more video surveillance and you could actually start following them through the neighborhood. And so then we knew he was the last one with her.”
“A short period of time later, Aiden was caught running on video by himself, holding his shoes and there was no Tristan in the video.”
“When you have a lot of the witnesses, a lot of the people involved, and they’re minors, it’s very easy for what somebody heard and what something goes through as rumor, um, versus the truth to diverge.”
Police detain Aiden and Trey in the back of a cruiser. And that’s when Aiden does something very concerning.
“Eventually, they all pull up in the front of the house and they move me into the squad car with Aiden.”
“He was like, ‘Let’s make memories.’ Like you make a Snapchat memory and you save it. So we remember, whenever, like, all this happened.”
“It’s a pop cart, guys.”
“She tripping, dude.”
“Fucking ra on this bitch.”
“Oh my god.”
“Got him doing his fucking flashbangs, and there…”
Aiden was put in the back of a police car to be questioned and posted on Snapchat. Real self-serving picture of him, like, defiant and pretending that he didn’t know anything about this.
“We’re having fun in a car.”
“Yep.”
“Tristan, what’s up guys?”
“Tristan, if you walk out the damn—when you see this in a month, I made one.”
“And I was just like, ‘Tristan, whenever you do come back, when they find you, I’m going to be so mad at you.'”
“I had to sit in the back of a cop car for, like, 30 minutes. I didn’t know anything happened.”
“His friend started messaging him. One friend messaged him that, you know, why she went missing, that, you know, what happened here.”
“Were there any other conversations that you had with Aiden?”
“He made a joke about us being in prison, and I was like, ‘That’s not funny.'”
“He was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if, like, we both went to the same prison?’ And I was like, ‘No, not really.'”
“Looking at his behavior, it just felt downright sadistic, disgusting, the way that he behaved.”
“Disbelief, I think, to know that somebody could be so cold. And I—I just don’t even have words for it. It was… it was hard to watch that.”
“Let me see your phone.”
“Thank you.”
“Take his phone to him for now. We’re going to be holding on to your phones.”
“All right, buddy.”
“Hey Siri, text Dream Girl.”
“They took my phone. I’m using Siri, and I love you, bye.”
“Hey Siri, text Dream Girl.”
“I can’t see your text.”
“The phone’s in the front seat.”
“I’m talking through the glass.”
“Hey Siri, text Dream Girl. Please stick with me through this.”
“Just had a complete and total arrogance, just a lack of care of human life.”
“What’s this place?”
“This a holding room.”
Once he’s brought into the station, Aiden stops talking to authorities. But when his parents come into the room, their recorded conversation reveals a lot more.
“You know, they found this girl, right?”
“Where?”
“In our neighborhood, down our main street.”
“Is she good?”
“No, she’s not. She’s dead.”
Parents asked to see him. So he was placed in a room with them, and they just started, you know, asking questions.
“This is very important. It’s all on you right now, my problem. You were the last one seen with her. So right now, it’s a lot of is facing you right now, son. So however you talk, you breathe, you think, then you respond. This is very serious, Aiden.”
“You can’t act like I don’t know.”
“You know, I think it gave a lot of insight into his character and who he is. His whole attitude was very nonchalant.”
“You’re 14 years old and this is your classmate and your friend, and you were with her last night.”
“Did you, uh, kiss or do anything with this girl? Be honest as you can.”
“Yeah.”
“Kiss her?”
“Any further?”
“So your DNA is going to be on her.”
His story was, is that they got to this particular intersection and they had kissed and then she grabbed his private part, and he pushed her down.
“So you pushed her down, and then you walked away?”
“We shouldn’t be talking.”
“You walked away. You came straight home. You didn’t turn back around, see where she went?”
“Did they ever say why it took you so long to get home?”
“Mhm.”
“They said I walked around by herself.”
“Mhm.”
“Did you just walk really slow home?”
“She hit her head, but I just left her there.”
And claimed to have just walked home after that. And he doesn’t get home until two hours later.
“And what was he doing in those two hours?”
“Well, he said he was just walking around.”
“Do you know if this girl got picked up? Picked up?”
“Tell him about her dealer.”
“You think she got picked up by him?”
“Probably.”
Aiden introduced that into the mix, that there was some person that sold, and it wasn’t even necessarily her. I mean, he said that—that that was her dealer.
“She said she wouldn’t come home. She said she’s going to find somebody to stay.”
“You left her there walking? Like, you think she got picked up after that?”
“She just kept walking, probably.”
Here is this model young person who is beloved in her community, who has a tight-knit family, who is a great student, a cheerleader, and somehow she disappears and goes to a drug dealer’s house. Didn’t make any sense.
“Did you see this 20-year-old kid? You didn’t get in his car?”
“I never even saw him before. I just heard about him that night.”
“Oh no, I’ve heard about him many times.”
“This is serious. It’s very serious. This is no joke. This is your whole life. Your whole life. And ours. And ours. And your brothers and sister.”
Mother’s Day weekend, 2021. St. John’s, Florida. Authorities set their sights on 14-year-old Aiden Fucci in the savage stabbing of one of his classmates, Tristan Bailey, a 13-year-old girl found dead in the woods near the neighborhood in which the two teens lived. Aiden is questioned several times by police, particularly since surveillance footage captures Fucci and Bailey walking together late in the evening before she’s killed. But when he’s brought in to the police station, the only people he’s talking to are his parents. And then something else caught investigators’ attention.
“You saw your, uh, your shoes were off on the camera. Why were your shoes off?”
“My feet were hurting, and those shoes give me blisters.”
“I got to go home to get your clothes.”
“What clothes?”
“The clothes you’re wearing.”
“There’d be nothing on those clothes, right?”
“I think ultimately what was important from that interaction with his, mostly his mom, was he admitted one thing.”
She basically asked him what he was wearing when he came home.
“You wore khakis or blue jeans?”
“Blue jeans.”
“You sure? Was not on—”
“When we looked on the camera, you were wearing khakis, right?”
“Mhm.”
“And he said, ‘Jeans.’ She’s trying to insinuate to him that, ‘No, you’re wearing khakis.'”
When you look back at our surveillance video, all the daytime video, it’s very clear he’s wearing jeans. And then Trey told us he left the house in jeans.
“They’re going to keep him here, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“They don’t have no evidence that I know of, you know, unless you know any other thing.”
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing to worry about, right?”
Aiden’s parents wanted to know the truth from Aiden, but they didn’t want law enforcement to know the truth.
“Are you not scared?”
“Not really.”
“Not really.”
“I’m a little scared.”
“If he didn’t do nothing, it wouldn’t be worried about.”
They were telling Aiden in the interrogation room to find a story and stick with it. They were more concerned about their son’s ability to get away with it than taking responsibility.
“I still see why you kissed her, and then all of a sudden she grabbed you and then you push her. You better find your story and stay to it. Y—like all that switching back and forth stuff.”
Police dig even deeper into Aiden. He may be suspicious, but could this 14-year-old be a killer? Authorities speak with his girlfriend.
“There was a really rough time for him at home. He would talk about that a lot. He would tell me his mom would tell him he was a disappointment. He felt neglected by her, that he felt neglected by both of his parents, that he was the least favorite in his family.”
Zophie was the girlfriend of Aiden Fucci at the time. She’s one of the ones that told us all of, um, his thoughts and desires. She was probably one of the main people he confided in.
“He told me that sometimes his dad would hit him and his dad never really let him show emotions. He feels worthless, perhaps suicidal, that he was having thoughts in his head to commit some sort of violence. He had anger issues. He told me that he really hated getting angry. He hated doing things that he didn’t mean to do when he got angry.”
“Have you ever seen Aiden get violent with anybody?”
“Yes.”
Sophie knew that Aiden was deeply troubled, but she never believed that he would actually commit such a horrific act against himself or others.
“He was into satanic, evil, violent-type of drawings. He would do them himself. He would ask other friends to draw them for him.”
“Aiden told me that he had voices in—in his head that told him those things, that told him that he was worthless and a disappointment.”
Someone who is disturbed enough to have satanic drawings and other ways that he was lashing out for help, but at that point, there was simply no one who could help him.
“Did Aiden ever discuss anything to you that would make you think he wanted to try to use a knife on somebody?”
“Aiden talked about killing people a lot.”
We always teach people if you see something, say something. But when you’re a young person and another person is lashing out verbally, you sometimes just talk up to braggadocio, that he’s just talking smack.
“Aiden and I had a dark sense of humor and I never took him seriously. He talked about wanting to kill me. Sometimes he would take his knife and pretend to stab me with it.”
“Did you ever hear Aiden discuss having a certain plan that he wanted to carry out? Did he ever discuss in detail, like, ‘This is how I would do something’ or ‘This is what I want to do’?”
“Yeah, be good.”
The difficult part of it is there were people who knew what he was contemplating and what he was planning. That’s one thing that kept coming out, is we didn’t think he was being for real.
“But that’s not even funny.”
In this case, it was real. He didn’t just talk it; he did it.
“He said that he would just walk at night and find, like, a random person walking to and just drag them in the woods and stab them. He said, ‘I should expect it within the month.'”
“And when was that that he said this?”
“I think this month.”
That’s one reason why investigators were able to focus on Aiden, because of the words he said which now made sense. Authorities are gathering evidence that suggests Aiden Fucci may be Tristan Bailey’s killer.
“It’s not like him.”
“What’s not like him?”
“To kill someone.”
It’s May 2021, and police are investigating the disappearance and death of 13-year-old Tristan Bailey in St. John’s, Florida. The young teen was found stabbed to death on Mother’s Day. Their prime suspect is Tristan’s classmate, 14-year-old Aiden Fucci, who officials say was the last person seen with her on doorbell and surveillance camera footage around the neighborhood they lived in. Investigators speak with several of Tristan’s friends. And there’s one more shocking connection between the young cheerleader’s murder and Aiden Fucci.
“Did Aiden carry any personal items on him?”
“Aiden kept knives for protection. He always had a knife on him if he wasn’t at school. We found out he was very obsessed with knives. He had two in particular that he had named. He called one ‘Picker’ and then he called that one ‘Poker.'”
“Did it look like this?”
“Yeah, that’s the same knife.”
The murder weapon was found in the pond right nearby, and the tip of that knife was found in Tristan’s head. Everything investigators have learned leads to a search of the Fucci’s home.
“We located shoes that were hidden that tested positive for blood. A shirt of his, and a pair of jeans in a hamper that were damp. And then a lot of those items tested positive for blood. The drain trap in his bathroom sink.”
“We were able to get her DNA on that knife, even though it had been in water for a period of time. The evidence was pretty overwhelming that he was lying all along. She didn’t just disappear. She didn’t just run to some drug dealer’s house, never to be seen again. He was directly involved with her death.”
The St. John’s Sheriff’s Office, they realized there was no sleep going on in our house. There was panic going on, and—and we were also in fear, not knowing how this could happen. Aiden Fucci is arrested and charged with murder, and due to the brutality of the crime, he’s set to be tried as an adult, facing 40 years to life in prison.
“They showed up at our door at 3:40 in the morning and he told us that they had him.”
“It was one of the first of many shifts with all—all of a sudden, that knowing, we just needed to focus on our grieving.”
“It’s horrific seeing a young child like that killed, right, number one? And then to think that another child could have done it was awful.”
Yet Fucci wasn’t the only one who faced charges from their own home surveillance system.
“We discovered that Crystal went up to his room and located a pair of jeans in a hamper that she felt had blood on them. And then you see where she’s taken them into a bathroom and clearly washing them in a sink. That what that was, is tampering with evidence. And, uh, we chose to charge her.”
If you want to know why someone can become Aiden Fucci, where it’s a cry for help, just look to the mother who then enabled him, who quickly tried to wash away the blood on his jeans.
“The fact that they had cameras meant that there was more evidence against Aiden, and evidence against the mother, seeing what she saw on his jeans and knowing that my child was missing and he was the last one seen with her. I just have no words for it.”
Nearly 2 years after Tristan Bailey’s murder, Aiden Fucci is set to go on trial. However, as jury selection is about to begin, he makes a life-changing move.
“That morning, we were set to pick a jury. But it’s 9:00, 9:30. I’m sitting back in chambers, and we still have no idea whether it’s happening or not.”
“Your Honor, on behalf of Aiden Fucci, we enter a change of plea at this time.”
“Mr. Fucci, is it your desire to enter a plea of guilty to one count of first-degree murder?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Part of me was shocked. I knew there would still be a lengthy sentencing hearing because he was a juvenile, but you’re happy that the family doesn’t have to go through a trial.”
“There was a lot of people coming up to us with a feeling that we would have a great sense of relief. We had already gone through and prepared for all the potentially horrific things that could come up. So, some of the things that we could have been spared, we were never spared.”
With the death penalty off the table because Fucci was a juvenile, now the question is: how long would he spend in prison? What he tried to do was to plead guilty and then hope that his guilty plea and his sudden expression of remorse would convince the judge to sentence him to something less than life in prison.
“Everybody knows the saying that ‘pictures are worth a thousand words.’ I know you will never forget those photos. There were 114 stabs. 49 of those were defensive. She was fighting.”
“There will be juveniles that will deserve a life sentence, and Aiden Fucci is one of those.”
That was sort of the goal to point out and put on evidence of why this murder… he is a juvenile, but this murder is very, very different. It was not impetuous, and he needs to be locked up for as long as possible to protect all of society.
“The behavior is so unusual in this case for a 14-year-old. It’s hard to know if immaturity played any role whatsoever. He’s a really unique person, I would say, in a bad way. He’s—he’s demonstrating some things that I think are extremely clinically concerning that we usually do not see in youth. His prognosis is poor for rehabilitation.”
When it comes to juvenile cases in Florida, if you’re going to give someone life in prison, the judge has to make an individualized determination based on the young person’s upbringing and the facts and circumstances of his life.
“We can’t go backwards in time. We can’t undo the action. The only thing that we can do today is answer the question of a sentence, and that’s whether Aiden would be sentenced to life in prison or 40 years.”
“40 years is not a light sentence. It is not an easy sentence. It still is punishment.”
“I think our biggest hurdle, if we had one, was, honestly, probably his age. He was not mentally well. He was not mature for his age. Children do not make sound decisions or wise decisions. Nothing in this offense points to maturity.”
“You have to jump through hoops in a juvenile case to get someone life in prison that you don’t have to jump through in an adult case.”
“Part of what Dr. Pritchard is relying on is the actions in terms of 114 stab wounds. In his opinion, that shows premeditation. How do you disagree with that?”
“I—I don’t understand it. You mean Aiden Fucci sat down someplace and said, ‘I’m going to stab this girl 114 times’? Is that what’s being said?”
“I don’t see how you can say anything about his impetuosity at the time of the offense without making assumptions about what’s going on in his state of mind, in his head.”
“I think that given mentorship programs, counseling, people reaching out to him, uh, that there’s a likelihood that he could be rehabilitated.”
And for arguably the first time, Aiden showed some emotion when his grandmother spoke.
“I wish I could change what happened, and, um, we pray for you every day. I pray for you every day. I hope that you find peace, and—and we lost a child too.”
“It was, uh, a lot of conflicting emotions. When she got up on that stand, my heart hurt for her.”
“Is that the boy you knew?”
“He’s not the boy that I knew. I don’t know what happened. I mean, he’s always been good and happy.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“He has a good family, and we don’t condone what happened, and, um, we’re very sorry. We lost…”
“It was the first time that we had heard from anybody immediately closely connected, any type of emotion, remorse, or anything. So it went a long way for us.”
“It also just points out the fact that when you have these people committing these crimes, they destroy multiple families, and they destroy their own family as well.”
In his own words, Fucci actually wrote an apology letter to Tristan’s family.
“We were given it in the middle of sentencing. He wrote it. It looks like an apology letter. It’s very simple. It’s not very in-depth.”
“You know, in the end, I think he’s probably sorry he got caught.”
The letter said, in part, quote: “I’m sorry that you didn’t get to know her that long. I know my apology will not fix anything or bring her back, but I hope it helps in some way.”
“It struck me as odd that what Aiden apologized for was us not having more time with her, and still didn’t hit me that he was really, truly sorry for killing her.”
“Maybe I’m jaded from being a prosecutor, but I don’t believe a word someone like Aiden Fucci says. I mean, now he’s remorseful, but only after he faces life in prison. It’s these deathbed conversions that you see from people when they finally realize they’re going to pay a major price. Then, all of a sudden, they express remorse, because they have to, not because they want to.”
Before the sentence was handed down, Tristan’s family was given an opportunity to speak.
“14…”
“This jar now holds 114 stones—one for each of the 114 stab wounds that my sister had to endure.”
“It really almost put into perspective, I know for us sitting there, in that 2 minutes it took to drop stones, um, just how much she probably had to endure.”
“I add this stone for the hope and belief I had in people being good that died the day that Aiden Fucci murdered my sister.”
“You, Aiden Fucci, decided to overpower a 5’3″, innocent 13-year-old girl. How much more of a coward could you possibly be? We are forever ‘Tristan Bailey Strong.'”
The family’s victim impact statements were some of the most powerful I’ve—if not the most—that I’ve ever seen.
“Aiden Fucci, you betrayed us all. Your deplorable actions are unforgivable, and I will pray every day that you stay in prison for the rest of your life.”
“Your Honor, Aiden Fucci took the very life that I brought into this world. Please do not, for one second, think that he could be rehabilitated at any point. He is beyond saving.”
“This crime had no motive. It was done for no other reason than to satisfy this defendant’s internal desire to feel what it was like to kill someone. There is only one appropriate sentence in this case.”
“Mr. Fucci, having entered a plea of guilty to the crime of first-degree murder, I adjudicate you guilty of the premeditated first-degree murder of Tristan Bailey. I sentence you to life in prison.”
“Eligible for review of the sentence in 25 years.”
“It was the maximum sentence that a judge could have given a juvenile. Aiden was given life in prison. Hopefully, he never sees a light day again.”
“There was no motive. He just wanted to do it. And I think that’s one of the most difficult parts, um, for us. It’s—there’s nothing she did. There was no reason for the crime. He just wanted to kill somebody.”
“It’s hard to equate it with the feeling. A lot of people ask us if there’s any sense of closure, and just given the age at the time, 25 years, it’s going to be reviewed. As a family, we’re going to have to endure what possibly could come up again.”
That may be the end for Aiden Fucci’s case, but there was still the matter of Aiden’s mother, Crystal Smith’s charge of tampering with evidence.
“It’s a third-degree felony. So in Florida, it’s punishable by up to 5 years.”
“We reached a plea agreement with her. Crystal was given a month in jail and 5 years probation.”
“It was a sentence that perhaps wasn’t as strong as some would like, but she pled guilty. She took responsibility for her despicable actions. In this tight-knit community, she’ll always be known as the woman who raised, enabled, and covered up for a monster.”
“I think one of the most special moments that I had with her was the weekend before—sorry, hold on—the weekend before she passed away. We were down in Orlando at one of her cheer competitions, and all her friends were there. She chose to be with me instead of her friends. She was like, ‘Mom, let’s just go to Disney. Let’s just, the two of us.’ And we did. And we had the best day ever. And I will forever be grateful for those—those memories with her.”
“The foundation is really, um, it’s where we have our energy, and it’s going to give us a chance to put passion into who Tristan was and what she did, but also what we’ve endured as a family and hoping to make it so that, unfortunately, when other families go through horrific experiences, they don’t have to endure some of the same things we did.”
There is one positive that’s come from this absolutely awful case, and that is the passing of a new law in the state of Florida. Something that was backed by the Bailey family. It is a law that now limits the release of crime scene photos involving a child. A very tough issue for Tristan’s loved ones during this case. And while that may be a small win, Tristan’s family and all of us may never really understand why her life was taken in such a brutal fashion by one of her peers. But the Bailey family hopes that people focus on the good that comes from tragedy and on the impact that Tristan made in her short 13 years of life.
“That’s all we have for you here on this episode of Prime Crime. Until next time, stay safe.”
