Unsolved Mysteries

Hey!

Tiffany was just... just always beautiful.

Always bright. Energetic.

She got a scholarship to play volleyball.

She was gonna be a middle starter.

That doesn't happen in college, being a freshman starter.

She wanted things in life.

We were all so very proud of her.

That night, she was found approximately four miles away from our house,

where she was hit by that train.

New Jersey Transit put it out there that my daughter committed suicide.

There's absolutely no way!

No way at all.

I wanna know what happened to my daughter.

This is my daughter's room.

The whole room is the way she left it.

That's her writing and her little hearts and what.

No one will ever go in this room.

It's like a tomb.

She loved life, and she was full of it too.

That's my baby.

I met Stephen in 1989,

and I had already had my girls, Jessica and Krystal.

I ended up pregnant with Tiffany and had her in 1997.

We were shocked when we had Tiffany.

You know, we didn't expect to get pregnant,

but the first time we laid eyes on her, it was just like...

you know, just heaven. It just...

She was absolutely gorgeous.

Tiff was just a ball of joy.

She enjoyed what she was doing. She didn't worry about nothing.

I mean, there's nothing that she didn't like.

Picture up there is of her on a beach in North Carolina.

This is New Year's Eve.

Uh, here's her graduation. You can see how happy she is.

Tiffany's sisters are the ones that had this made for me.

Just a memorial of all, you know, of Tiffany's life.

To walk in here every day just makes me feel close.

I feel like she's with me 'cause I miss her so much.

It was a Sunday.

We went to Tiffany's cousin's graduation party across the street.

And Tiffany came with us.

We were there for several hours

steaming clams and having a good old time.

Tiff was having a great time.

Playing volleyball, having fun, waiting for her friends to come over.

I remember Tiffany running back home.

We were still at the party, and at 9:15,

I got a phone call from one of her girlfriends and says,

"I'm pulling up now. Can you come over to the house?"

I said, "Sure, is everything okay?"

So I told my husband, Stephen, that I gotta go over to the house,

and he said, "Oh, I'll go with you."

And we walked up to the road between the two houses.

Tiffany's friend got out screaming and hollering,

and accused Tiffany of using her credit card without her knowledge.

And Tiffany denied it until after the friend left,

and then she told me that she did use it.

And I said, "Why would you use somebody else's card?"

"You know better than that. Didn't raise you that way."

"And now I gotta go tell your dad you used the card."

And I went in the house,

I got Stephen, and within one minute, we walked back out, and Tiffany was gone.

We looked for her. Looked around.

I walked up and down the street many times.

There must've been at least 20 or 30 cars going back and forth up this road.

They were all parked on the side of the road. Nobody's seen nothin'.

I know if Tiffany walked, somebody would have saw her.

There's no doubt in my mind. She's 6'2". You couldn't miss her.

We were walkin' up and down the streets,

looking behind houses and everything close

'cause we knew she wouldn't walk any distance

because she was scared to death of the dark.

Everybody was calling, texting,

you know, trying to find out where she was.

Stephen's calling and she's not answering her phone.

Tiff, please, just come home.

I love you to death. You mean everything in the world to me.

Please just come home.

I walked up and down that street.

And all of a sudden, I looked down at the ground,

and I had seen something flat.

-And it was Tiff's phone. -

Phone was about five to eight feet off the side of the road.

In front of my house.

That kid would have never left her phone here.

That phone was locked to her hand 24/7, seven days a week.

She took a shower with the phone.

Then when we found the phone,

all kinds of things are going through my head.

I knew there was something wrong.

We were searching,

and then later on, Stephen remembered about

the deer camera being in the woods.

Tiff left at 9:28, according to my deer camera.

And me and Dianne walked out at 9:29 with Tucker, which is her dog.

We walked outside and she was gone.

Tiffany was wearing a black shirt,

white blue-jean shorts.

She had her flat shoes that she had just bought,

and she put her hair up with a messy bob on the top

and her white headband.

She's doing her regular stride, walking down the driveway.

And because of the picture on the deer camera,

the only thing I could come up with is that somebody called her name.

And at that point, she was gone.

I got a phone call, "Hey, Tiffany's missing."

"Can you come and help look for Tiffany?"

I said, "Sure."

We went to my mom's house 'cause they assumed she probably went there.

It's walking distance. I would say roughly a half mile it would be at most.

She wasn't there.

So then we started driving around different places.

We couldn't find her.

Something told me just to go down Pomona.

And when I drove down Pomona, I crossed the railroad tracks.

There's a roadway alongside of the tracks.

-An access road for transit. -

It was lit up.

There was a Galloway police officer there said somebody was hit, possibly a female.

But Galloway Township didn't get involved in it

because this happened in the jurisdiction of New Jersey Transit.

I saw a transit police officer there.

I spoke to him.

I say, "Hey, did you happen to see a very big girl,

6'2", very athletic?"

And he said, "No, but we had somebody who was struck by the train."

At that point, I'm thinking, "I hope it's not Tiffany."

But they were pretty confident that it was her.

The transit officer said to me, "Can you identify her?"

And I said, "Yes, I can."

And I am very glad that I am the one that went down there,

'cause I truly believe in my whole heart

that my brother would never have been able to handle it.

What I saw that night, no one needs to see that.

It was probably one of the most horrific things I've seen.

You know, being struck by a train.

So I went there, and I did do the identification,

and then they said, "Hey, we have to go back to your brother's,

and you have to tell your brother."

It was 2:30 in the morning.

And I remember walking out of the house, and my son-in-law was standing there,

and he said that Uncle Mickey called him, told us to stay put.

And I remember my son-in-law looking totally white.

And I remember us waiting

and some type of cop car pull in.

My brother, Mickey, got out of a transit police car,

and Dianne's yelling, "What happened? What happened? What happened?"

And I told my brother what happened. Tiffany was hit by a train.

He did say, "I wanna go down there." I'm like, "No, you're absolutely not."

"You don't need to see this."

We just lost it.

It's like... you lost your life.

When one of your kids die, you lose part of your life.

Oh, God, I miss her so much.

She was my baby.

I miss everything about her.

I mean, we just held each other and cried.

It was like in disbelief.

It was the most horrible thing you could even imagine at that time

that something like that could happen.

We were in such shock.

Total shock.

'Cause, like, hit by a train?

It just didn't make sense to me.

Mickey said that Tiffany got hit by a train.

We didn't know what happened.

Then the following morning,

it was already in the papers Tiffany had committed suicide.

I was devastated.

I couldn't understand, you know, how they could come up with that.

My daughter wasn't depressed. She wasn't suicidal.

Tiffy was happy.

She was making plans to go to college.

She was making plans with her roommate.

She was making plans to play softball that Wednesday.

She had plans to go to Great Adventure the next morning with friends.

The night I spoke with Tiffany, obviously, at the party,

she showed no signs of any kind of stress.

She had her school clothes. She had things prepared.

Tiffany was ready to make that next move.

There's no way in hell she committed suicide.

New Jersey Transit made the determination that my daughter stood on those tracks

and committed suicide in less than 24 hours from the time she was hit.

People that knew Tiffany just couldn't believe it.

We were on a mission because we knew our daughter didn't do this.

My name is Paul D'Amato.

I've been a trial lawyer for 46 years.

Most of my cases have involved representing victims.

And there have been those cases, like Tiffany's case,

that you simply cannot say no to.

When I first met Steve and Dianne,

they were sitting right here.

And they were so broken

and so upset.

They told me that

their daughter did not take her own life.

I didn't know if I could help them, and I said to myself,

let me get the records

from the New Jersey Transit Police Department.