Trents FB message to a relative
“Hey, are you free to talk? I really need to talk right now!” Trent wrote.
Sure, she’d replied. What’s up?
“I’m in trouble and I don’t know what to do! I know it’s going to be hard for you to believe but I’m telling the truth! Please, please help me. Mum and Dad went out on Monday to get horse feed and I was home doing my schoolwork and Tia was at home too,” he wrote.
“After Mum and Dad left she told me that if I don’t have sex with her she will kill Lewis my dog. She has been trying to get me to do stuff with her for a long time. Under sufferance of this I just couldn’t take the chance of Lewis getting hurt!
“I had sex with Tia without protection … but now she is saying she had stomach pains. I have changed from what I did to you because I know it is wrong and I still hate myself for that but I’m telling you the truth now and I need you!! Please!!!! I would rather kill myself than live with my family thinking I am some sicko and if you don’t believe me then I will, so please believe me because I don’t want to leave you all.”
He was terrified Tia was pregnant, he told her. He didn’t know what to do. If she was pregnant, he would go to jail. Nobody would believe him. He repeated that Tia, a 12-year-old, had made him do it. It was her fault.
Later, he would tell police he’d made this up, that he’d lied to make Tia look bad and himself look better.
“I just want the kid gone and out of my life but I also know she is a source of income for Mum and Dad as well and I can’t risk us losing money because she is gone,” he wrote.
He told her Tia had spoken to a friend of his, a girl named Tahlea, at a Father’s Day dinner. Tia had confided in Tahlea that Trent had been trying to “get her to do things”. Tahlea had confronted Trent and Trent had denied it, saying Tia had “problems”.
“I haven’t told Tahlea about anything though because I don’t want her to not believe me.”
The relative, Trent’s confidante, gave him sensible advice that night. She said his family would always support him, that the past had been forgiven but that he needed to talk to his parents about what was happening. She asked why he hadn’t gone to them when Tia had pushed for sex, when she’d threatened his dog. Why hadn’t he just told his parents? She pushed him to talk to them now.
“You just really need to decide what you’re gonna say leading up to it. Think about some of the questions they’re going to ask, and most importantly, be nothing but honest!” she wrote.
They continued the conversation through to the following day
“Are you going to tell them?” she asked in a message at 5.49pm.
“I’ll do it tonight,” he wrote. “When both Mum and Dad are home.”
ON OCTOBER 29, Tiahleigh Palmer dressed in her school uniform, grabbed her purple backpack and jumped in one of the Thorburn cars for the short drive to school.
After classes, she went to drama club. And from there, she went to the Crestmead PCYC for a hiphop dance class. Her foster brother Josh helped teach that class, but partway through, Tia told him she was struggling, that she had a sore stomach.
Josh sent a text message to his mother Julene, asking her to come and collect Tia and drive her home. When Tia emerged from the PCYC, she seemed quiet, depressed.
“We’ll go home and you can have a hot shower and some Panadol or Nurofen,” Julene told her. It had been an odd day. Earlier she had received a text message from a family member.
“There is a serious problem,” the woman had written. “A major issue … I desperately need to talk with you.” They hadn’t talked yet. Julene had no idea what it was about.
Trent got home from work when Tia was in the shower.
He had something to say. Tia wasn’t around and he wanted to get the conversation over with before she appeared.
“I have done something terrible,” Trent told his mother. “I had a sexual encounter with Tia.”
He started crying.
