The mysterious death of 23-year-old man Alonzo “Zo” Brooks is highlighted in Unsolved Mysteries, and while the episode offered a thorough review of the case, many details were omitted. Alonzo Brooks’ friend Justin Sprague was the last person to report seeing him alive, after he left Brooks alone at a party on the evening of April 3, 2004, in La Cygne, Kansas. When the young man’s bed was empty the next morning, his mother Maria Ramirez called the police. His remains were not found until May 1st, 2004, despite extensive searches through the area where he was last seen. How Brooks’ body came to rest in a creek mere yards away from the house in which the party was held, and why it took so long for it to be discovered, is unknown.
The documentary series Unsolved Mysteries was rebooted by Netflix, premiering on July 1st, 2020. Netflix’s version varied from the original format of the show in that it focused on mainly true crime reporting, featuring interviews from real friends and family of victims rather than simply having actors reenact events. Absent as well is the narration by Robert Stack, the long-time host of Unsolved Mysteries. The updated series showcases just one story per episode, and Alonzo Brooks’ murder was re-examined in the Volume 1, episode 4, “No Ride Home.”
Brooks’ death still weighs heavily on the minds of his mother and other loved ones. His cause of death remains contested: his body was well-preserved upon its discovery, despite having apparently rested in a creek for a month. On the evening of his disappearance, he had been left alone by the friend who drove him to a party 50 miles away from his home with no way of returning. He didn’t know many people at the gathering, and was one of three persons of color in attendance in what has been called an aggressively racist area. Many theories on Alonzo Brooks’ murder focus on the notion of a hate crime or accidental death stemming from an altercation, but no clear evidence can be found that suggests Brooks was in fact murdered.
What Netflix Leaves Out About Alonzo Brooks
“No Ride Home,” directed by Michael A. Clarke, made a solid attempt to talk about Alonzo’s character. He was the sort to always call in and check with his mother, and he was a responsible and measured man. In interviews with his mother and childhood friend Rodney English, both assert again and again that “Zo” was relatively introverted and not prone to go off to a party with a lot of people, especially if they were strangers. “I don’t know how they got Alonzo there. He must have been drinking. He must have passed out [on the way there] for him to be in a car more than 45 minutes to go to some place he’d never heard of,” said English in an interview with Daily Mail. In fact, an anonymous source reported that Brooks and his friends had been drinking since noon that day, and they heard of the party through a loose connection.
Another point made about Brooks that was later denied by his friend English was that the racial tension going around at the party didn’t upset him. Daniel Fune and Tyler Broughard, two of the friends who attended the party, said in the Netflix documentary that he wasn’t prone to let that sort of thing bother him. The Alonzo Brooks episode of Unsolved Mysteries did not include English’s rebuttal to that sentiment; as he told Daily Mail “Somebody calls Alonzo the n-word and he’s ready to go or ready to fight. Alonzo was a beast. It would take a lot to put him down but he’s not staying there happy, partying after that.“
What Unsolved Mysteries Omits About Justin Sprague
A lot of recent focus has been on the friends — particularly Justin Sprague — who left Brooks at the party despite having heard racial slurs being bandied about. English expresses his bafflement at why these young men would leave their half-black, half-Mexican friend in such an environment. Sprague was one of three friends interviewed along with Fune and Broughard, and he was the one who drove Brooks to La Cygne, which he said was a solid hour away from their home town of Gardner, Kansas. Not only was there an omission concerning their day-drinking, but Sprague, who was 18 at the time, was reportedly both high and drunk when he left Brooks at the party, and likely did not include this detail to officers as he had just enlisted in the army and didn’t want to risk his career with a DUI.
The Unsolved Mysteries episode does not mentioned that Sprague did not leave the party alone, but had a friend with him. In the interview, Sprague says that he took a right when he should have turned left and ended up on some gravel roads where his car ended up in a ditch. It took him 30 minutes to drag the car out, and by that time he didn’t want to return to the party. After the car incident, however, Sprague didn’t return home. Instead, he and his companion headed to a gas station where a camera on an ATM captured them withdrawing $200. They then went to a strip club and were ejected.
Both Ramirez and English say that Sprague’s story was never the same through years of interviews with law enforcement. Ramirez said that Sprague “changed his story six times,” concerning the night of the party, and English was affronted by the amendments. The day after the party, English, Sprague, and Brooks’ brother Billy Brooks Jr. drove back to La Cygne to search. On that day, Sprague told them that his car had broken down. “He didn’t say anything about getting lost. He said his car had broke down and he had to fix it at the side of the road. It was something you couldn’t even fix like that by yourself in the dark — like a broken axel or something. Justin is full of s***,” English said.
Unsolved Mysteries Leaves Out Anonymous Tips
Since the incident, internet users and natives of Gardner and La Cygne have not only theorized about what happened to Brooks, but have emailed tips and reports to crime experts. In an interview, Susan Schmidt [via Reddit], a blogger for Cold Case Kansas, discusses an article written for her site about Brooks in September of 2010. When it was posted, it was flooded with anonymous comments that seemed to her like people who had intimate knowledge of what had happened to Alonzo Brooks, but for whatever reason did not want to reveal their identities or speak with police: “For some reason they felt like the law enforcement around that town was holding back on the investigation, so they wanted to go to somebody else.” People also wrote in to attest to how racist the town could be. Some claimed that it was widely known that the town motto was, “If you’re black, don’t let the sun hit your back,” and went on further to describe La Cygne’s “sundown town” status and its commitment to safeguard its own while accepting harassment toward people of color.
Since the episode aired, the Alonzo Brooks case was reopened and his body exhumed. U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister suggested to People Magazine that “Likely multiple people know what happened that night in April 2004. It is past time for the truth to come out.” Executive Producer and showrunner of the Netflix documentary series, Terry Dunn Meurer, says that Unsolved Mysteries now receives thousands of tips. Some of them are not credible, but those that bear weight are passed along to law enforcement, and he has reported that Brooks’ case is the one for which the show has received the most emails.
Other Details Eliminated By Unsolved Mysteries About Alonzo Brooks’ Death
Some smaller details — some perhaps significant, some perhaps not — were left out of Unsolved Mysteries. The episode did not include that the medical examiner who studied Brooks’ body, Dr. Erik Mitchell, was forced to resign in 1993 from his Syracuse practice [via New York Times]. Mitchell had been under investigation for misconduct, including stowing away skeletons and other body parts in his office and removing organs from corpses without the consent of the deceased’s family members. The episode shows a testimony from Rodney English that Brooks’ boots and hat were found on opposite sides of the road, but one source revealed that though the hat was flung far away as English described, the boots were paired neatly together across the road from the farm, standing upright, undisturbed. Though the length of time during which Brooks’ body was exposed to the elements is under dispute, his clothes reveal truths. According to Meurer, she was contacted by an entomologist who suggested looking into the maggots found on the body: “She was looking at these photos of Alonzo’s clothing and there were maggots on that clothing. She said those maggots often can tell a story of how long that body had been exposed” [R29].
As a whole, Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries did its duty in reporting the crime succinctly and accurately, but as is always the case with documentaries, some content was left out — either due to time constraints, for the sake of clarity, or in order to present a narrative. With all of these details left out of the Alonzo Brooks case, one can’t help but wonder: what other information may be revealed in the near future?
