Four days after giving birth to her new baby, 25-year-old Jasmine Thorne allegedly left her Long Beach home to pick up some taco ingredients for her family on April 8, 2023. Days later, her car was found abandoned just a few blocks away, with her wallet, phone and keys inside. Over two years later, Thorne still hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
Although there hasn’t been any prior news articles or publicity about Thorne’s disappearance, her household made headlines the following year, when police say her godbrother fatally shot the father of her baby. Thorne had been living with both men as well as her godmother when she went missing.
Her sister, Kadeshia Williams, believes that there’s no way Thorne willingly walked away from her children.
“I just want the community to share my sister’s story, to reach the news, for everyone to just see she’s been missing this long. I’ve reached out, I’ve cried,” Williams said. “[…] I just want the community to help me as I would help them if it was their loved one.”
How Thorne’s birth family found out she was missing
Williams recalled to the Signal Tribune the moments after her birth mother discovered that Thorne had disappeared. Their birth mother called her frantically at 3 a.m., repeatedly yelling, “Jasmine’s missing” through the phone as a half-asleep and confused Williams tried to comprehend what she was hearing.
Williams eventually learned that not only was her sister missing, but she had been missing for two months at that point, and no one had bothered to alert her birth family.
Williams shared that she and her sister came from a dysfunctional family and grew up in foster care. As an adult, Thorne moved to Long Beach from the East Coast with her godmother, her godbrother Damion Castro and her partner Jamie Jones. Her godfamily and birth family were tangentially connected through social media, and it was only through seeing posts on social media that Thorne’s birth mother learned she had gone missing.
The concerned sister said she reached out to Thorne’s godfamily for answers, but was met with hostility from Castro. She was on the phone with Thorne’s godmother when she says Castro took the phone from his mother and began cursing at her and her family members.
“He was very, very aggravated, very aggressive,” Williams told the Signal Tribune. “And I’m just trying to figure out, why was he so agitated, aggressive to us? Because if we’re supposed to be on the same team, that’s supposed to be your godsister, why are you against us? And that’s the same one who killed her baby’s father a year later.”
According to Williams, Thorne’s godfamily first said that Thorne had left home on her own to buy some groceries for her family. She said they later changed their story and said a friend had come to pick her up. Williams said she was able to get in contact with this friend, who denied picking up Thorne before she went missing.
According to Williams, although there was allegedly a GPS tracker on Thorne’s vehicle, it took Long Beach police a few days to find it a couple blocks away from her home. All of her personal items were inside the vehicle.
“She didn’t have anything — nothing. She didn’t take her wallet — no ID, no purse, no phone. Everything was in the vehicle,” Williams told the Signal Tribune.
They say tragedy comes in threes: Thorne’s birth mother passed away last September, still searching for her daughter.
“It was only me and my mom speaking up for my sister,” Williams said. “And now that my mom’s no longer here, I’m the only voice, and I don’t have a loud voice. I don’t have that much.”
The police’s response to Thorne’s missing person case
Williams said the Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) has been treating Thorne’s missing person case as if she’s voluntarily missing and hasn’t been taking it seriously. She told the Signal Tribune that she’s been calling LBPD repeatedly, but police have never shared any updates on the case with her.
“Every time that I’ve called the police, the police have been unwilling to call me back,” Williams said. “They’re not good at calling back. When they have called back, they constantly told me that they had no leads or no information on Jasmine, yet the detective sounded very uncaring.”
LBPD confirmed to the Signal Tribune that it believes Thorne to be voluntarily missing, and it doesn’t think there’s a connection between Thorne’s disappearance and her partner’s killing the following year.
There was no press release or public statement made by LBPD informing the community of her disappearance. Not only that — it took over two years for Thorne to be added to the California database of missing people. The Signal Tribune regularly looks through the online state database to find out when Long Beach residents go missing and only found out about Thorne’s case because she was finally added to the database in July.
Her sister said police recently shared a different account of the events leading up to her disappearance, telling her Thorne had gotten into an argument with others in the home before storming out of the house. However, her sister emphasized that police had only recently presented this version of events to her, after her sister had been missing for over two years. This account also contradicts Thorne’s godfamily’s version of events, in which they never mentioned Thorne being angry when she left home.
Williams believes the reason the authorities haven’t been taking the case more seriously is because she and her sister are former foster youth who don’t have many people in their corner.
“Our family has been discombobulated, and I just feel like the police don’t care enough, because she doesn’t have enough people that care,” Williams said.
Advocacy for Jasmine’s case
With a lack of police support, Williams took matters into her own hands to find her sister. She began posting about her sister in missing persons groups on social media. Through social media, she met Laura Bollock, an advocate who shares information about missing persons cases online.
Bollock was the one who first discovered that Thorne was missing from both the state and federal databases for missing people. She began calling LBPD regularly to ask about the case and inform them that Thorne was missing from the databases. Although Thorne has now been added to the state database, she is still missing from the federal database.
“I see it a lot in missing person cases,” Bollock said. “You know, the ones that get kind of lost in the missing world are the ones that are the vulnerable kids from the foster system that have family that has kind of spread out and maybe not close biological family. Very sad, but I think we’re making some progress. I’m hoping we’re making some progress, at least having her in the state database is a start, I’m going to get her entered in the national database as well.”
Who is Jasmine Thorne?
Thorne would now be 27 years old. She is described as a Black woman with brown eyes and black hair, standing 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighing 200 pounds. She has a lollipop tattoo on her upper right forearm and an unknown tattoo on her upper left forearm. She also walks with a limp.
But far more than that —Thorne was a beloved sister, daughter and mother. And even if she wasn’t any of those things, her case would still deserve attention.
“She was a beautiful person,” Williams said, describing her sister. “She loved to dance, she loved to model and take pictures, she loved family. […] She loved to goof off. She brightened people’s day by being so goofy. She’s the life of the party. She made everybody laugh, even when she was going through something.”
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