Dymtrias Jasmine Smith, a 24-year-old Black woman, died on September 25, 2018, after her body was found in a wooded area behind Ms. Jean’s Restaurant off Lisa Street in Rincon, Georgia. Early reports said the discovery came in the middle of the afternoon, and at first the case opened in a haze of uncertainty, with police publicly describing her death as suspicious while they worked to understand how she ended up there. Smith was identified in local coverage as being from Garnett, South Carolina, and the circumstances surrounding where she was found quickly turned the case from a grim discovery into a homicide investigation.
In the days that followed, investigators said they began piecing together Smith’s final movements through interviews and surveillance footage. According to Rincon police, family and friends provided leads, and video evidence helped place Smith with a man they believed was involved in her death. That investigation led to the arrest of 27-year-old Dimario Bernard Garrett, who was charged with murder just weeks after Smith’s body was found. Public reporting at the time described Garrett as someone Smith knew, making the arrest feel especially devastating because the case appeared to center not on a stranger, but on someone from within her circle.
As for what happened after the arrest, the public record available online is thinner than the early news coverage, but later prison-related reporting indicates that Dimario Bernard Garrett was serving a life sentence in Georgia, suggesting the case ended with a murder conviction rather than remaining unresolved. We did not find reliable public reporting identifying additional suspects in Smith’s death, and the clearest online accounts point to Garrett as the sole named suspect and the man ultimately tied to the killing.
