“Do you think it’s bad that I love animals more than people?”
—TIFFANY JANTELLE, AGE TWENTY-THREE
As we pulled up in the live truck in front of their house in suburban Piscataway, New Jersey, I breathed a sigh of relief. No cars parked out in front, no people milling around the yard. We would not have to contend with dozens of mourners glaring at the two strangers visiting a family whose daughter had died just the day before. When a young person suffers a sudden, violent death, their loved ones can be looking for somewhere to direct their anger. Someone to blame. Sometimes a news reporter is the most convenient target.
Waiting on Corrine Nellius’s front porch, I was filled with a mixture of dread and anticipation. I glanced over at photographer Ernie Mickens and saw his same worried expression. But then the door swung open and a grieving mother beckoned us inside like we were long-lost friends.
“Jen! I’m so glad you’re here!” she exclaimed. And then Corrine did something completely shocking. Before Ernie turned on the camera, before we even sat down in her living room, she embraced me in a long hug. I hugged her back and could feel her chest heaving with sobs as I told her softly how sorry I was.
I was momentarily stunned. Yes, I knew Corrine had invited us to her home and I knew she was willing to talk. I knew she wanted to get her daughter Tiffany’s story out in the public eye. But after a decade of having heartbroken family members slam the door in my face and tell me to get lost (or worse), I was simply not accustomed to this sort of welcome. Someone begrudgingly agreeing to talk to us for five minutes was the most I had been acclimated to expect.
I was also surprised—and flattered, I might add—that she recognized me. I was not exactly a “local celebrity.” After giving birth to my daughter eight months before, I had only been back from my (third) maternity leave for a few months. I had been working part time, three days a week. My stories aired on the evening news in two-minute increments. My on-camera portion added up to thirty seconds at most each time. Unless I was exiting the news van holding the Eyewitness News microphone or wearing station gear, I was almost never spotted outside of work. People rarely asked for a photo or an autograph. The most common form of recognition was someone thinking we had met before—at a party? Through work? After I’d spent nine years of covering New Jersey, my face was vaguely familiar, but not quite ubiquitous enough to generate an instant connection.
But Corrine was clearly an Eyewitness News superfan. Despite experiencing the most profound loss, she graciously ushered Ernie and me into her home. She even offered us cookies.
“Can I get you two coffee? How about some food? People have been dropping off so much.” Her voice trailed off as she pointed to the heaping piles of casserole dishes and platters on her dining room table.
Ernie and I both declined, and I could see that he felt as disoriented as I did. He was the longest-serving photographer at Eyewitness News, his experience dating back to before I was born. And he had never seen a mother who just lost her child manage to care so much about the comfort of others.
“She must still be in shock,” Ernie and I would agree later when we were commiserating in the live truck. I am thankful, especially on the days when we bear witness to the rawest emotions, to have the friendship of my photographer colleagues. I have never reported a story alone, never shot my own video or edited my own piece. I work as part of a team, and we lean on each other for support. The live truck occupies a midway point between a victim’s living room and our own. We process the pain and the hurt that we report on here together, by analyzing it and trying to understand.
Corrine may have been in shock that day, but she knew exactly what she was doing when she invited us and news crews from every station in the New York market to her home in central New Jersey the day after her beloved daughter died. She was counting on us to put Tiffany’s story and news of the reward on TV that night to convince someone to turn in the man who ran her over and left her to die.
Is he hurt? Oh my gosh, pull over.
Victoria Barletta had seen it too, and she was already slowing down before her best friend Tiffany Jantelle ordered her to stop. She pulled her car onto the shoulder, the headlights illuminating a familiar figure swearing on the side of Weston Canal Road.
He was not the reason Tiffany sounded the alarm, and her eyes narrowed as she watched her boyfriend, Danny, pacing outside his car. She had left him less than ten minutes earlier, explaining that it would be easier if Victoria drove her home. She hadn’t expected to see him again so soon, and certainly not like this.
Danny was running his fingers through his hair, stopping to glance momentarily at the quivering animal in the middle of the two-lane highway before turning away.
As soon as Victoria put her car in park, Tiffany yanked open the door and sprinted out as fast as she could move in flip-flops.
What happened? she asked Danny, her voice shrill and stressed.
I hit the dog, Danny confessed. I feel so bad. He just ran out of the woods and I couldn’t stop in time.
Call 911! Tiffany cried as she ran over to the dog lying gravely injured on the double yellow line. He looked up at her with resignation, his limbs still shaking slightly on the pavement. He appeared to be a small German shepherd with honey brown fur. She reached out to pet his head and to peer into his glassy eyes, her own reflection staring back at her with concern.
You’re going to be all right, Tiffany whispered soothingly.
Danny and Victoria watched from a few feet away. Tiffany’s boyfriend and her best friend both knew that if she had to choose between them or an animal, she would probably choose the animal. They had seen some version of this scene before: Tiffany coaxing an injured stray cat out of her aunt Lisa’s backyard in a snowstorm. Tiffany catching a cow when he got out of his owner’s pasture. Tiffany greeting a mangy dog as if he were an old friend. Her first love was animals, her life was animals, and the more vulnerable they were, the more she loved them.
Danny’s forehead was lined with worry as he forced his hands in his jeans pockets and exhaled sharply. He started moving in Tiffany’s direction but hesitated. Approaching her would mean having to see the wounded dog up close. Instead, he stood twenty feet away in the northbound lane, ready to direct approaching cars around Tiffany and the dog in the middle of the road.
It’s not your fault, Danny, Victoria said reassuringly. It was an accident.
Victoria glanced back at Tiffany and knew they were going to be there a while. She got in her car and made a U-turn, aiming her headlights to illuminate Tiffany and the dog. She started feeling around in the dark for her cell phone to make the 911 call. A decade later, Victoria is still questioning each of these small choices, wondering why she and Danny didn’t stand up to Tiffany and insist that she immediately move the dog out of the road.
Back in the street, Tiffany was preoccupied with the suffering animal. She knelt next to him, her legs digging into the pavement. She put the dog’s head in her lap and stroked his trembling fur. I’m not going to leave you, she murmured.
Tiffany would never leave that dog, and she never left her own animals either. While her friends moved away after high school graduation, she chose to stay home with her mom and stepdad and take classes at the local community college. Tiffany loved her two dogs and two cats, but her five beloved horses—Jane Jetson, Nasha, Angel, CJ, and Max— were her life. They had a special bond, an unspoken language. The horses respected her, and she adored them. At just five feet tall, wearing size zero clothes, Tiffany simply had to move her head one way or point her hand another and the 1,500-pound horses would comply.
Doll, do you think it’s bad that I love animals more than people? Tiffany would ask her mother, using their term of endearment for each other.
Tiffany woke up before dawn to care for the horses every morning at the barn, and she spent most of her free time riding them, competing in equestrian events and earning a wall full of ribbons and trophies. Sitting tall on the horse, with her long blond ponytail under the black cowboy hat, she made a striking image.
“She started riding when she was seven years old,” her stepdad John “JR” Nellius remembers. “She was like the horse whisperer. She was assertive, a small person with a big personality.”
To help pay the substantial bills to house and feed her horses, Tiffany had worked for a time at Party City and proved that she was able to manage the store. She was about to get a promotion at the oral surgeon’s office where she worked as a receptionist.
If I could just get someone to pay me to do something with horses, I would be set for life, Tiffany would tell Victoria. She was thinking about veterinary school but was intimidated by the course load and the four-year time commitment.
Just as she liked to control the horses, Tiffany was usually the one who drove—she had the nicer car, a white Acura RSX with a manual transmission so she could feel like a race-car driver. But that Friday night, she convinced Victoria to pick her up. Tiffany had turned twenty-three the day before, on June 16, 2011, and she wanted to relax while someone else took the wheel. They were going to the Manville Bowling Alley for Danny’s beer pong tournament. Danny was a ranked competitor and took it seriously, which Tiffany and Victoria found comical. He took it so seriously, in fact, that he decided to drive separately in his own car that night so that his girlfriend and her best friend wouldn’t make him late.
It was a valid concern. Tiffany had asked Victoria to pick her up at eight p.m. By 8:10, she still wasn’t outside. By 8:15, when she did come outside, she had to run back inside two or three times to retrieve the items she had forgotten. Keys, lipstick, and did she remember to unplug her hair straightener? The last time Tiffany walked out the front door, Corrine and one of their dogs, a Pomeranian named Charlie, were trailing behind.
Tiffany got you to drive tonight for once? Corrine called out to Victoria.
I can’t say no to her, Victoria answered.
Corrine picked up Charlie with one arm and embraced her daughter with the other. Love you, doll, Corrine said. Don’t stay out late. You have to be up at five a.m. for the horse show tomorrow, she warned her.
Corrine shifted her gaze to Victoria in the driver seat, who will never forget the last thing Tiffany’s mom said to her that night.
Precious cargo in this car, Corrine said. Be careful.
Elsewhere in Somerset County, New Jersey, on that Friday night, another group of friends was standing around a Wawa convenience store parking lot drinking beers, killing time, and waiting for a pig.1
Where is he? Brian McCauslin asked impatiently. Everyone’s going to be at Rhythms before we even get there.
Brian, his girlfriend Lynn, and their friend Joe were drinking cans of Miller Lite out of the cab of Brian’s pickup truck. Brian stocked up before he left his house in Pennsylvania for the weekend, jamming 150 cans of beer into the cooler. Police would later surmise that the trio had started drinking the beer hours before, when Brian and Lynn first arrived in New Jersey, and then they ordered even more beers at dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings.
The pig that was causing the delay was for Joe’s birthday party the next day. He was turning thirty on Sunday and his mom was hosting a backyard party at her home Saturday night for all his friends. The centerpiece of the event would be the pig roast. Now they just needed Dan the Pig Guy to deliver the pig. Next to the beer cooler, Brian had filled another larger cooler with ice so they had somewhere to put the 120-pound animal carcass while they were celebrating at the bar.
At age thirty-eight, Brian was close to a decade older than the rest of the group and he was starting to regret being so involved in the party-planning details. He rubbed his eyes, ran his hands slowly down his face, and glanced around the darkening parking lot.
You falling asleep on us? Joe asked. The night hasn’t even started yet.
Now that the sun was setting, it was harder to stay awake. Brian had worked back-to-back overnight shifts at the manufacturing plant two days before, eight p.m. to eight a.m. After getting off work that morning, he later told police he had climbed into bed around ten a.m. and only slept for a few hours. He woke up that afternoon, hitched the pig roaster to the back of his Dodge Ram 2500 pickup truck, and he and Lynn drove the three hours from York, Pennsylvania, to Franklin Township, New Jersey.
After a few more beers in the Wawa parking lot, they finally got the pig and headed to Rhythms of the Night, a bar in Manville where at least a dozen friends were waiting to toast Joe’s entrance into his thirties. People were pushing mixed drinks into his hands, sliding shots across the bar. Every time Joe turned around, it seemed like another glass spilling over with liquor materialized.2 As it got closer to midnight, the bar got louder but somehow everything seemed slower. Joe bounced around from friend to friend, not really following the conversations anymore but laughing along anyway.
Brian and Lynn were not laughing. They were fighting in the corner, Lynn facing him with her back to the dance floor, her head lolling awkwardly as she tried to catch his eye.
Why won’t you dance with me? Lynn pleaded, the words slurring together, making it even harder to understand her over the pulsating music.
Brian rolled his eyes and said, I don’t want to dance. I’m exhausted. Enough.
Finally, just before one a.m., Brian put down his drink and decided it was time to go. He later told police it was his second, maybe third beer at the bar. Forensic investigators would analyze witness testimony, bar and restaurant receipts, and recorded phone calls to approximate how much alcohol he had consumed that night. They put the totals much higher—five beers at the bar, at least ten total that night, all for a man who weighed only 160 pounds.3
Brian led the way as they walked out to the muddy parking lot behind the bar and got into his black truck. Lynn climbed in the back seat. She was still smoldering after their argument. Joe stumbled around the truck and got into the passenger seat. Brian started the engine and they drove out, heading toward Weston Canal Road.
Around the same time, in another parking lot just a mile away, another three people were heading home. Danny, Victoria, and Tiffany walked out of the bowling alley, Danny analyzing where his beer pong strategy had failed.
As Danny grumbled about his tournament loss, Tiffany and Victoria followed closely behind him, smirking and rolling their eyes.
Calling the competition at the Manville Bowling Alley a beer pong tournament was a misnomer. It had all the mechanics of beer pong, same rules, but the cups were filled with water. The technique was identical to the one used in frat house basements, but the cost for losing was just getting a little bloated. Tiffany and Victoria had planned to be spectators, but then decided to enter the tournament for fun. They made their own team, Why The Long Face, and performed hilariously badly.
It was Friday night and she wasn’t driving, so Tiffany had two drinks at the bowling alley. Her favorite, Captain Morgan and Coke. Two drinks was always her limit—she wanted to be in control. She also knew she was going to have to drive her little white sports car an hour away at dawn the next day to feed and groom her horses before the competition.
Victoria barely drank anything; she was so tired from being up early for work all week. And she was driving. Precious cargo, like Corrine said.
Tiffany walked Danny to his car as he got out his keys.
Love you, she said, giving him a kiss. Don’t worry about tonight; you’ll do better at the next one. Call me when you get home.
She returned to Victoria’s car and turned on the radio. She found a song by one of her favorite bands, Four Year Strong, and texted a friend with her favorite lyrics. Victoria headed north on Weston Canal Road back to Tiffany’s house. They had just crested the hill when Tiffany saw the dog in the road.
By the time Tiffany got settled with the injured dog, a small group had gathered.
What’s going on? Jennifer Gerow asked as she drove by. She tried to discern what was happening, why this young woman with the long blond hair was sitting in the middle of the road with a dog on her lap. She stopped her car in the southbound lane to block traffic, put her hazard lights on, and called 911.
Seconds later, motorcyclist Jose Olivera approached and parked his bike next to Gerow’s car, right next to Tiffany in the double yellow line.
I hope the police get here soon, Tiffany said to the other drivers.
I think we’re losing him. Can a dog go in an ambulance? Could they take him to the animal hospital? Maybe we should just put him in the back seat of our car?
As Tiffany debated the fate of the dog, Brian drove his black truck northbound along Weston Canal Road. He went up the hill, hit a small bump. Brian would later tell investigators he was distracted by the headlights of the car parked in the oncoming lane with its doors open. As the truck got closer, Danny waved his arms wildly, yelling to get the driver’s attention. The truck’s engine roared as it barreled toward them. It wasn’t stopping. Witnesses said the truck seemed to swerve to avoid hitting Danny, just as he was shouting at Tiffany to move.
She never let go of the dog.
Standing up while trying to keep her grip on the animal, Tiffany stumbled, awkwardly turning toward the shoulder. She took one, maybe two steps. But it was too late.
There was a split second of silence after she was hit.
And then the screaming started.
Danny ran back to where Tiffany was lying. He leaned over her, the reality not computing. Her legs were moving slightly. Her head was turned away from them. The dog lay next to her, still. And there was blood—so much blood. Danny touched her gingerly, wanting to comfort her but not wanting to make it worse.
Tiff? You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay, Danny recited, like a mantra. But he knew inside it wasn’t true.
Brian pulled his pickup truck over near where Victoria had run out of her car when she heard the sickening impact and the subsequent shrieks. She saw two doors open. She says Brian stepped out, while Joe seemed to practically fall out of the truck on the passenger side. Brian walked back toward where Tiffany was lying in the road, while Joe tried to steady himself on his feet. He appeared terrified and confused.
We’re in deep shit, several witnesses heard Brian say to Joe, his voice panicked as he got closer and surveyed the scene. Brian glanced over in Tiffany’s direction. He hadn’t seen her until it was too late to stop, until he was just ten feet away from her. Why was she in the middle of the road? And where had that dog come from?
Joe looked around, dazed. He wavered on his feet and his gaze drifted toward the woods. It was like a nightmare.
Look what you did! Danny screamed as Brian approached. Look what you did to my girlfriend!
Danny and Victoria would later tell investigators that Brian was stumbling in the road, slurring his words. That he got close enough to Tiffany to see the damage he had inflicted. He had run her over with his 5,000-pound truck going at least fifty miles an hour. Her chest and pelvis were crushed by his tires. Her head was struck by a piece of metal hanging beneath his twelve-year-old vehicle, a faulty steering mechanism he hadn’t bothered to fix.4
Somehow, Victoria managed to steady her hands to dial 911. Somehow, she managed to speak the words that she didn’t want to believe.
“My friend just got hit by a car!” Victoria shrieked. “Oh my God, Tiff!”5
Brian had seen enough. As Victoria screamed into the phone and Danny continued screaming at him, Brian turned to walk back to his truck with his head in his hands. He yanked open the door and sped away, leaving Joe standing in the street.
No one thought to write down the truck’s license plate number. Why would they? He had pulled over, at first. Victoria was in shock, her entire body shaking. She couldn’t say a word as she walked over to where Tiffany was lying. She wasn’t sure her best friend could comprehend what she was saying, but Victoria said it anyway: I’m here, Tiff. I won’t leave you.
Nothing was making any sense to Joe. It was his thirtieth birthday and here he was, standing on the side of the road with a young woman dying in the street. His head was spinning. The moon seemed to be vibrating. The sound of Danny’s screaming was jumbled in his head. He wavered on his feet, deciding what to do.
He took off running. He kept running until he saw a side street he recognized. He called his mom. He called his girlfriend. It was 1:54 a.m.
When his girlfriend showed up ten minutes later, Joe confessed.
Brian hit some girl with his car. It was bad, really bad. I didn’t even see it; I was turned around and talking to Lynn in the back seat. He stopped, but then he drove away and left me there. They were yelling, there was all this blood … so I ran. I didn’t know what else to do. You can’t tell anyone about this.6
I won’t tell anyone, she agreed, according to police interviews. Let’s go home.
According to statements they later gave police, Brian and Lynn had already confessed to Joe’s mom and had parked the truck in her backyard, next to where they had dropped the pig roaster. Her house was so close to the accident scene that they could hear the police sirens and the helicopters flying overhead as they tried to fall asleep that night.
Tiffany’s friends and family all met up early that morning at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick. Bad news travels fast, and before long, more than sixty people had gathered in the waiting room. Tiffany’s older brother, Robert, the family, and his friends were clustered on one side. Tiffany’s friends were on the other, comforting Victoria and Danny while trying to understand exactly what had happened out there on Weston Canal Road.
She was sitting in the middle of the street? With the dog?
Tiffany and her animals. Of course she had to help that dog.
Did you get a good look at the driver?
Tiffany’s mom, Corrine, who had been shuttling between the two groups, appeared stricken. She always slept with her phone next to her bed, but that night she had forgotten it in her car. The police banged on her front door around 1:30 a.m.
Your daughter has been in a serious accident, the grim-faced officers told Corrine over the barking of Tiffany’s dogs.
That’s not possible, Corrine answered. Her car is right there in the driveway.
You need to come with us to the hospital right now, the officers urged.
When Corrine rushed into the emergency room, she headed straight for Victoria. She’s dead, right? Corrine asked. Victoria broke down in tears.
“I still have never forgiven myself,” Victoria recalls. “Why did I agree to pull over?”
When the doctor came out and asked somberly to speak with Corrine, everyone knew it was bad. We did a brain scan, the doctor said, pointing to the image on the screen of the portable computer. There is no brain activity. I’m so sorry.
Corrine collapsed on the emergency room floor, hysterically crying and gasping for air. It was what she had always feared. When Tiffany turned sixteen, Corrine had a premonition that her daughter would die young. The mother and daughter had never fought over anything more than a tube of mascara. They would go to the barn “for an hour” and wind up staying for five.
“Not many teenagers choose to spend their free time with their mothers, but Tiffany did,” Vanessa Hughes remembers. Vanessa has worked with Corrine at a physical therapy practice for decades and remembers that once Tiffany got her driver’s license, she would visit the office even when her mother wasn’t there. Tiffany would leave sticky notes on her mom’s computer screen. Love you doll, they read. Thanks for dinner, Tiffany wrote, signing her name with a heart.
Corrine spent the day in Tiffany’s hospital room, her friends and family filing in to say their last goodbyes to the beautiful young woman whose severe injuries had rendered her almost unrecognizable. They took her off life support just before midnight, and Tiffany Nicole Jantelle died in her mother’s arms.
Later that weekend, the same people who ran over Tiffany, stopped to see her mangled body in the road, and then drove away, decided to go ahead with Joe’s birthday party. They entertained dozens of people, drank more beer, and toasted Joe’s next decade. A small circle of friends knew the truth, but most were oblivious to what had happened after Rhythms the night before.
On what would be the last night of Tiffany’s life, they still had the pig roast.
That Monday afternoon when I showed up at Corrine’s door, the driver who killed her daughter was still walking free. Corrine’s fury was endless and she wanted justice. The driver who hit Tiffany left her lying in the road. When Danny had hit the dog, Tiffany had insisted on stopping to help. The pickup truck driver couldn’t even call 911 after he hit a person.
Brian Stack, the prosecutor in Somerset County, would later note how exceptional Tiffany’s choice really was. “If she had been like 99 percent of the people out there and driven past that scene and not stopped, she may have still been alive today,” Stack said.7
The broad smile on Corrine’s face when she greeted us at her front door was not reflected in her eyes, which betrayed the well of sadness that would never dry up. After Ernie and I declined her offer of food, she invited us into the living room, where the photo albums were already spread out on the coffee table. Tiffany’s equestrian ribbons were piled on a side table, next to framed photos of Tiffany with her beloved horses. I sat down to take a closer inspection. Tiffany’s dog Charlie came over to me, and I obliged and rubbed his puffy Pomeranian head.
Corrine sat down on the couch and we clipped on her microphone. She was eager and nervous. She was heartbroken and in denial. Some part of her still believed that Tiffany was going to walk through the door in the middle of our interview, laughing her high-pitched giggle, and ask what all the cameras were for. She had not even been gone for thirty-six hours. After they took her off life support, she died on June 19, 2011—Father’s Day and her stepdad’s birthday.
While I recognized that I was there to help, to shine the spotlight of public attention on the hit-and-run driver, I couldn’t help but feel like I was intruding. I shouldn’t be the one hugging Corrine, I thought. I shouldn’t be monopolizing her time. But she desperately wanted justice for Tiffany, and the only way to accomplish that was to rally as many people as possible to search for a black pickup truck with a liftgate installed. The intimacy of the moment was intense, but I knew my time was limited, so I got to work.
“Tell me about your daughter Tiffany,” I prompted gently.
I rarely start with the tragedy. I leave those horrific details until later. It’s too jarring to start with a question about someone losing their child. Even though Corrine acted as if she knew me, we hadn’t established that initial bond that would allow me to probe into her personal life and feelings. I asked some warm-up questions, just to get her comfortable with talking to me and being on camera.
“How long had Tiffany been riding horses? Tell me about her love for animals. What did she study in college? What was she doing for work?”
This is the opposite of the way we conduct interviews at breaking news scenes. There, the conversation is tenuous from the start. The eyewitness is likely speaking with us reluctantly. If someone has agreed to talk to me in the middle of an emergency, I assume that they will walk away at any moment. I ask the toughest questions first, assuming that every question will be the last one they will answer. But sitting on Corrine’s couch, I knew that neither she nor I was going anywhere.
I listened attentively as Corrine told me about Tiffany, so many wonderful, precise, and painful details. Her love for animals, foreshadowing her eventual death. How she would bring home feral kittens and house train them. How she picked a temperamental horse, named her Jane Jetson, and trained her to be a champion. I would use some of this information in my news story later, but mainly for background. Corrine wouldn’t start speaking in sound bites until I asked her about the accident. Until I asked her to tell me about the hit-and-run driver who was still walking free, the person who took the time to examine the harm he had inflicted before driving away.
I had my notebook on my lap and a pen in my left hand, but I didn’t use it. I don’t like to break my gaze on the person I’m interviewing for too long, and I don’t want the writing to distract from my listening to every detail. I don’t script questions ahead of time because I find it interrupts the flow of conversation and stops me from asking pertinent follow-ups. I research before the interview and list several bullet points on a sheet of paper so I can glance down in case I forget something. I play the interview tape all over again once I get back in the live truck and transcribe the details then.
“I know this is going to be hard, Corrine, but I want to talk to you about the crash. Take your time and don’t feel you need to answer anything that makes you uncomfortable.” I sat patiently and steeled my heart against what I knew was coming next.
When Corrine did finally describe the accident, it was worse than the initial news reports had described. I had read about Tiffany’s love for animals, but it didn’t truly sink in until that moment that she had sacrificed her life to try to save a dog—a dog named Sunny, whose family cared enough to microchip him, but who never claimed him after he too died in the crash. Corrine understood Tiffany’s connection to animals on a visceral level and did seem to accept that her daughter would never have walked away from a dog in need.
“She had asked me to pull over for animals before,” Corrine remembered. “Just a month ago, we pulled over while towing the horse trailer—not an easy thing to do—after Tiffany saw a Shih Tzu on the side of the road. She coaxed that dog into her arms and brought him back to his family. She was raised with so much love and compassion.” Corrine was still in shock that day, but she knew her daughter better than anyone.
The day after our story aired, police showed up at Brian’s parents’ house asking questions, and Brian turned himself in. On June 21, 2011, he was charged with knowingly leaving the scene of a fatal accident and was remanded to the Somerset County Jail.
I didn’t know until recently that it wasn’t our news story—or any news story—that led police to Brian. It was Tiffany’s brother, Robert. Fueled by grief and anger, he had been driving around with friends for hours every day, refusing to rest until he found the guy who hit his sister. He didn’t find the black pickup truck, but he did connect with a young woman who had been at the Rhythms party and heard some vague story about an accident. About a guy walking around in some random cornfield after running from the scene. A friend’s friend made the connection—maybe the “accident” was Tiffany? Robert urged her to call the police, who acted quickly to verify the information.
Police may have already been investigating Robert’s tip when I was sitting down with Corrine. The only reason Corrine invited us to her home to sit through an agonizing interview the day after her daughter died was to try to track down her killer. We may have introduced the community to Tiffany and highlighted her remarkable life. We certainly made viewers feel compassion for this young woman who died trying to save a dog. I hope our story served as a cautionary tale about reckless driving. But the reality is that Brian McCauslin would have been found with or without us.
Three days after McCauslin was booked in jail, hundreds of people gathered for Tiffany’s funeral. They released pink balloons into the sky and cried countless tears for her loss, which felt so unjust. So cruel. Her life was just beginning. She was buried in a cemetery close to her mother’s house, with a heart-shaped tombstone featuring an engraving of a horse and the inscription “An Angel Rides in Heaven.”
The day after the funeral, Corrine started what would become her ritual: get up at 5:30 a.m., drive to the barn to care for Tiffany’s horses before work, go back twice more during the day to make sure they had enough hay and water. “She still never says no to Tiffany,” her husband, JR, says. The other friends and relatives went back to their routines as best they could. But for Corrine, that was never an option.
She posts on Facebook almost every day. It’s not always about Tiffany—Corrine has her husband; her son, Robert; and now a daughter-in-law and granddaughter, too. She still celebrates birthdays, cheers on game day, takes vacations, and hosts family holiday gatherings. But it will never be the same. Not without Tiffany. “Missing my Tiff with every ounce of breath in my body,” she writes one day. “I do not think anyone understands my emotions and how I’m trying so hard to keep her memory and her horses going,” she posts.8
Some parents who lose children prefer to grieve in private, allowing the massive weight of their pain to afflict them in the solitude of their mind. Not Corrine. Her loss is a burden she is compelled to share with others, to somehow parse out parts of the load of misery so she doesn’t have to shoulder it all herself. She doesn’t pretend to be at peace and doesn’t care if it makes people uncomfortable. A decade after the accident, her Facebook profile reads, “I am a mom who lost her heart and soul. My only daughter was killed by a drunk driver.” Corrine posts on social media when she’s having a terrible day, when her endless loss hurts so deeply that she crawls into her daughter’s bed in the bedroom that is now Tiffany’s shrine and cries herself to sleep.
Corrine still goes to the cemetery every day, sometimes twice, even lying facedown on the carefully tended grass so she can draw her own body as close as possible to her daughter’s remains. There are always fresh flowers and never any weeds. When it snows, Tiffany’s grave is the only one that has a path shoveled from the road by the next morning.
Corrine posts on the RIP Tiff Facebook page and gets together for coffee with Tiffany’s friends.9 It’s harder now, seeing the girls getting married and having children and thinking that’s what Tiffany should be doing. She offers comfort and advice to other moms whose hearts will never be whole again after their children died. She keeps an Angel Tree in her house at Christmas, filled with ornaments, memories, and trinkets that fellow grieving parents have shared. “We are all members of a club we didn’t want to be in,” she explains. She messages with parents from as far away as Australia, consoling each other about how hard it is at the holidays. On birthdays. Every day. Mornings are the worst, after Tiffany visits Corrine in her dreams and she wakes up and realizes the nightmare is her real life.
I never stopped thinking about Corrine or Tiffany. And so much of that is because Corrine never lets people forget. She was one of the people who inspired me to write this book. I had some sense of how Corrine was feeling based on what she chooses to share with the world on social media. But what about the many other families I had met, whose living rooms I had sat in so soon after they lost their loved one? What about the people I interviewed who survived horrific accidents or hurricanes or unjust convictions or life-threatening illnesses? Witnessing the never-ending cycle of grief for one family made me wonder about what happened to other people I had featured on the news.
I correctly predicted that Corrine would want to participate in this project because she would view it as being part of Tiffany’s legacy. Tiffany’s brother, Robert, hopes that her story inspires people to think before they get behind the wheel after a night out partying. “Everyone can learn from this experience,” Robert tells me. “Even if it’s just appreciating everything you have, the people in your life.” Tiffany’s friends spoke with me because they want the community to remember their kindhearted friend. And everyone who knew and loved Tiffany wants the world to know that they never really got justice.
Brian McCauslin’s defense attorney would later tell the court that his client ran from the scene because “he saw what had happened and it horrified him, specifically because he’s not a violent, cruel person … it was too much for him.”10 But prosecutors and the sentencing judge said they believed he knew exactly what he was doing. Judge Robert Reed told Brian that “his fleeing the scene was successful in protecting him from the more serious charge of aggravated manslaughter, which would have exposed him to up to twenty years in state prison had he been apprehended that night and found to be under the influence of alcohol.”
There would never even be a trial. Brian McCauslin made a deal with prosecutors in Somerset County to plead guilty to leaving the scene of a fatal accident, a second-degree felony. Judge Reed said he “suspected and believed that [Brian] was under the influence of alcohol,” but no one could ever prove how much he was drinking because he fled the scene.11 A toxicologist who analyzed witness testimony about Brian’s beer drinking in the backyard, restaurant, parking lot, and bar that night estimated his blood alcohol level to have been around 0.16, double the legal limit to drive in New Jersey. He had six prior driving violations, five for speeding and one for driving while intoxicated. Judge Reed compared Brian getting behind the wheel of his truck that night to “a bullet that had been discharged looking for a victim.”
Corrine spoke at Brian’s sentencing hearing on April 13, 2012. She handed photos of Tiffany to the judge and asked to remain seated, since she was so overwhelmed with emotion. “We are furious that he has stolen Tiffany from us, and what angers us more is that he refuses to own up to his actions.” Corrine said that when Brian drove away from the scene, he was “hiding until his blood alcohol was normal again … his lack of remorse shows us that he has not learned anything in the last ten months.”
Brian chose not to make a statement before he was sentenced. The mood in the packed courtroom was tense. The McCauslin family was there to support Brian, and Tiffany’s friends and family packed the benches on the other side of the room. The two sides never communicated. Judge Reed had harsh words for the thirty-nine-year-old, noting the “cowardice and callousness” of his actions and adding, “Tiffany was killed by this man because of reckless, irresponsible, and depraved behavior … if there is true justice to be done, it will await the judgment of another judge on another day.”
McCauslin was sentenced to seven years and was out on parole within six months. He was ordered to pay $13,268 to Tiffany’s family for her funeral expenses. A check for $140 shows up from him in Corrine’s mailbox once a year, which she hesitates to deposit until it’s about to expire. Public records show Brian is living back in Pennsylvania. Neither he nor his lawyer returned my calls requesting an interview for this book.
No one else who knew about the crash and allegedly covered it up was ever charged. Joe wound up getting his own license suspended three years later, when he earned his third DWI conviction for driving while close to three times New Jersey’s blood alcohol limit.12 His mother Wendy, who harbored Brian after she knew he had hit someone with his truck, died in 2014. Her house was less than five miles away from Corrine’s. Wendy told police she didn’t even ask her son much about the crash the next day at his party, saying, “You don’t want to know what happens with your kids.”13
Danny, Tiffany’s boyfriend, gave statements to investigators and was there for sentencing day. Corrine helped him rent a house across the street in Piscataway when he needed a place to live. His visits to see Tiffany’s family grew less frequent over time, and then he moved away. They have no ongoing contact.
Victoria still lives in New Jersey. She married her high school sweetheart and has a daughter of her own now. She says as she gets older, the pain of losing Tiffany only intensifies. “I realize that I will never have another best friend like her. We were two halves of the same mind,” Victoria tells me. “The person I was before died with Tiffany that day.” She starts crying and adds, “I try to forgive myself and focus on the happy times, but her death left a huge void in my life.”
After McCauslin received what they felt was an unjustly light sentence, Tiffany’s family lobbied for years to try to get Tiffany’s Law passed. The law would make it a more serious crime to leave the scene of a fatal accident. It never passed. In New Jersey, if you have been drinking and leave the scene of the crash you caused, you will likely face less serious penalties than if you stick around, take a Breathalyzer, and are found to be drunk.
“I want to continue working to get Tiffany’s Law passed,” her brother, Robert, tells me. “I want that to be her legacy. Make it so other families don’t have to go through what we did.”
Looking back on the case, I am drawn to all the parallels, the similarities between everyone involved. They were all traveling the same path and then split at the moral fork in the road. Two groups of friends out on a Friday night. Two birthdays celebrated. Two vehicles that hit a living being in the road.
That’s where the similarities end. Because one group stayed to help. The other ran. One mother rushed to be with her child. The other didn’t ask questions. One family sat at a bedside and held their daughter’s hand for the last time. The other hosted a party. One community, torn apart by a crime, and a family, still held together with love.
“I miss her every second of every day,” Corrine says. “But I’m still here. And I think my mission in life now is to help other parents who have lost children. To show them that the love between you and your child never dies.”