Four years after Dasia Allen disappeared, prosecutors accuse two people of turning a roadside encounter into a deadly abduction.
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — A traffic collision near Riverview Drive and Chain of Rocks Drive is now the starting point of a murder case that took more than four years to reach court. Police say 25-year-old Dasia Allen was driving to buy diapers for her infant daughter when the crash occurred in March 2022. Minutes later, investigators allege, armed men had taken control of her car and were driving away with Allen still inside.
That roadside encounter is central to the charges now filed against Kristian Haughton and Jamont Ellis, both 30. Each faces first-degree murder, first-degree robbery and first-degree kidnapping. According to the police account summarized in charging documents, Haughton was driving the other vehicle involved in the collision, with Ellis and Denzel Williams riding as passengers. Authorities say the crash was followed by an altercation. Ellis and Williams allegedly emerged carrying firearms, approached Allen and entered her 2005 Mercury Montego. Police contend they left the scene in Allen’s car while holding her at gunpoint. The allegations do not establish that the collision itself was intentional.
The case then moved away from the crash site and into a period investigators have only partly described. Haughton allegedly abandoned the vehicle she had been driving and arranged to reconnect with Ellis and Williams. Police say the men were traveling in Allen’s Mercury and that Allen remained inside against her will. Investigators contend Haughton met them and aided the men as the vehicles moved around St. Louis. Publicly reviewed reports do not state where the group went during that period, whether Allen was able to communicate with anyone or exactly when the alleged kidnapping became a homicide.
What investigators can place more clearly is the fate of Allen’s car. Roughly two hours after the crash, the Mercury was found burning in the 700 block of Thrush Avenue, according to local reports describing the charging documents. Fire investigators determined that the blaze was arson. Allen was gone. The destruction of the vehicle became one of the first major public clues in what was initially treated as a disappearance. Years later, it also became part of the prosecution’s chronology: crash, alleged armed takeover of the car, movement through the city and then an intentionally burned vehicle with its owner missing.
Allen’s relatives did not know that chronology while they were trying to find her. Contemporary reports said the young mother had left home to shop and then stopped communicating with family and friends. Her burned Mercury was located, but Allen herself remained missing. Relatives offered a $5,000 reward for information and publicly asked for help. Her mother appealed for her safe return. Police circulated information intended to help locate her. The later allegation that Allen was buying diapers adds a specific purpose to an errand that, in the first days of the search, appeared to have ended without explanation.
More than a week after Allen disappeared, relatives and friends searching in north St. Louis found her body near Scranton Avenue and Riverview Drive. The discovery on April 9, 2022, ended the missing-person search and began the public phase of a homicide investigation. Authorities later said Allen had been shot multiple times. An officer writing about the case in court documents used the phrase “frenzied execution.” Investigators have not publicly released a minute-by-minute account of Allen’s death, and the phrase does not establish which person fired the shots. Police have said they do not know precisely when during the alleged abduction Allen was killed.
The area where Allen was found also produced physical evidence that police say later helped advance the case. Investigators recovered .40-caliber shell casings. Charging documents say those casings were linked to two separate incidents, with one associated with Ellis and another associated with Haughton. The reviewed reporting does not provide the underlying forensic reports, identify every firearm involved or explain whether investigators recovered a weapon they believe was used to kill Allen. The significance of the casings, according to authorities, is that they supplied connections between evidence from Allen’s homicide scene and people who would eventually be charged.
Investigators say their case also developed through an interview with Haughton. Police allege she admitted taking part in the traffic crash and acknowledged helping Ellis and Williams after it happened. A full recording or transcript of that interview was not available in the reviewed material, meaning the precise scope and context of her alleged statements cannot be independently assessed from the public reports. Haughton was arrested July 27 with help from the FBI. She was subsequently held without bond, according to initial coverage. Ellis was already incarcerated on unrelated weapons and narcotics violations when police announced the charges in Allen’s case.
Williams, whom police describe as the other alleged armed participant at the crash scene, died before prosecutors filed the 2026 case. Authorities say he was killed in an unrelated St. Louis County incident in 2023. Any charges connected to Allen’s death would therefore be abated because he is dead, police said. His death complicates a case in which the public charging narrative describes several people acting at different points but does not publicly assign every act to one individual. The reports reviewed do not identify who prosecutors believe fired the fatal shots, whether more than one person fired, or whether all three alleged participants were present when Allen was killed.
The absence of a publicly stated motive is another notable feature of the case. Police have described the traffic crash as the event that brought Allen and the other group together, but the available reports do not say that Allen knew Haughton, Ellis or Williams beforehand. Authorities have not publicly explained why the confrontation allegedly escalated from a collision to an armed kidnapping, why Allen was driven around the city or why her car was burned. Those unanswered questions do not prevent prosecutors from filing charges when they believe the evidence supports them, but they remain central to understanding a crime that otherwise appears to have developed with extraordinary speed from an everyday roadway event.
The newly filed charges also show how different the case looks now from the investigation residents saw in 2022. The public story then was largely about a missing woman, a burned car, a family searching and, finally, the discovery of a body. The 2026 filings place those known facts inside a much larger police theory involving the crash, guns, an alleged abduction, coordinated travel through St. Louis, arson and forensic evidence linked to later suspects. Police have not publicly explained all investigative steps taken during the four intervening years. The available reports do not say when Haughton and Ellis became suspects or when prosecutors decided the evidence was sufficient to file the three felony counts against each of them.
Those counts remain allegations. Criminal charges state what authorities believe they can prove; they do not resolve disputed facts or substitute for a conviction. Haughton and Ellis may challenge the ballistic evidence, witness or defendant statements, the alleged sequence of events and the prosecution’s theory of individual responsibility. The public reports reviewed do not establish how either defense intends to respond. They also do not show a final ruling on the charges. That distinction is particularly important because police have described a group of alleged participants while leaving some of the most consequential details, including who fired the shots, outside the publicly released narrative.
Initial reporting scheduled a preliminary hearing for Haughton on Aug. 27, but no reliable later account reviewed for this update confirmed what occurred at that proceeding. No final disposition or trial result for Haughton or Ellis was established in the sources reviewed. The case therefore remains unresolved in the public record available for this report, with prosecutors accusing both defendants of murder, robbery and kidnapping and significant questions about the final stage of Allen’s abduction still awaiting resolution through the court process.
Author note: Last updated Sept. 8, 2026.