Nearly 10 years to the day after Tiffany Valiante was discovered dismembered on the tracks of a New Jersey Transit line, her parents have filed suit against the state, claiming overwhelming negligence for announcing her death as a suicide just 12 hours later.

Tiffany Valiante “was the victim of a premeditated hate-crime murder, not suicide,” a statement from the family’s law firm asserts.

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The lawsuit, believed to be the first filed under the New Jersey Constitution’s Crime Victims’ Bill of Rights Act, asks the court to direct state agencies to release to the family long-withheld evidence key to what they call a “full and proper investigation” of Valiante’s death.

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At the top of a list of dozens of accusations describing how authorities mishandled her case, the suit asserts that New Jersey Transit Police and other state officials “did not consider whether Tiffany was the victim of a ‘hate crime’ because of her sexual identity as a lesbian.”

“Tragically, this case was closed in less than 12 hours without a full investigation that Tiffany and her family – victims in their own right – deserved then and now,” said the family’s attorney, Paul D’Amato.

“New evidence, including a trove of recovered text messages, reveals that Tiffany was targeted, because of her sexual identity, in the weeks and months leading to her death,” he said.

Many of those messages, recovered and analyzed by independent investigators, were threatening and hate-filled, pointing to repeated harassment, the lawsuit states.

Valiante’s death was the subject of a widely seen episode of Unsolved Mysteries: Mystery at Mile Marker 45, featured on Netflix in 2022.

Based on his analysis of the evidence, independent forensic pathologist Dr. Wayne Ross said Valiante was likely murdered and her body placed on the tracks to mask the killing, leading investigators to believe her death was a suicide.

A toxicology report that showed no signs of alcohol or drugs in Valiante’s body was dismissed as insignificant, the family says, and the nurse practitioner who pronounced Valiante’s death at the scene expressed grave concerns regarding the “surgical” precision of her dismemberment, uncharacteristic of a train strike, let alone a suicide.

The suit also asserts that authorities ignored a widely respected protocol that, before a determination of suicide, homicide must be ruled out. The site of Valiante’s death was never treated as a crime scene.

Neither Valiante’s parents or any other potential witnesses who knew the 18-year-old were interviewed before the state announced her death as a suicide and closed the case.

Hours before her body was discovered, Valiante argued with her parents and disappeared from the house, wearing a shirt, shorts, and shoes. Images from a deer camera recorded her leaving.

Valiante was discovered on the tracks wearing only a sports bra and panties.

The day after she was found, Valiante’s uncle and his son scoured the train tracks to find anything left behind by investigators. The men came across pieces of Valiante’s bones, and jewelry she’d been wearing.

“Walking to the tracks, I see bloody rubber gloves laying on the ground. That scene’s already contaminated. It wasn’t even roped off. New Jersey Transit … they’re not trained for that, and they didn’t do a good job cleaning the tracks,” Valiante’s cousin told Unsolved Mysteries.

After Valiante’s death, her mother discovered her daughter’s headband and shoes neatly placed on the side of a road, about two miles from where she was struck by the train. Nearby was a sweatshirt and a key chain that didn’t belong to Valiante.

After contacting police, her parents were finally interviewed for the first time. 

That mysterious keychain later went missing before testing could be conducted, along with an axe with “red markings” found near the crash site, according to the Daily Beast.

As well, photographs taken by Transit Police showed a pool of blood collected on the tracks where Valiante was hit, suggesting that her body may have been there for some time before the train’s impact.

“My daughter wasn’t depressed. She wasn’t suicidal. Tiffy was happy,” her mother said.

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