Tonight at 6 p.m., the Valiante family’s backyard in Mays Landing will begin to fill with quiet footsteps, familiar embraces, and the flickering light of candles.
The gathering, now an annual rite of both sorrow and stubborn hope on July 12th, marks ten years since the death of Tiffany Valiante — a promising 18-year-old volleyball standout whose future was shattered along a stretch of track in the humid dark of a South Jersey night.
It was just past 11:00 p.m. on July 12, 2015, when Tiffany, barefoot and partially clothed, was struck and killed by a New Jersey Transit train bound for Atlantic City.
The impact occurred almost four miles from her family’s home, and under circumstances that remain hotly disputed to this day.
Within hours, and with no autopsy, rape kit, or DNA analysis performed, investigators ruled the death a suicide.
To Tiffany’s parents, that conclusion was not just premature—it was impossible.
Those who gather at the Valiante’s home (3160 Mannheim Ave., Mays Landing, 08330) do so not only in memory, but in protest.
They light candles, share stories, and play volleyball — a nod to the sport Tiffany loved and the life she had planned, one that included a scholarship and a college dorm room waiting for her just weeks away.
The Valiante family has spent the better part of a decade arguing, often in the face of official indifference, that Tiffany did not end her life that night — that she was taken, harmed, and left on the tracks as the final act of a crime still unresolved.
“Tiffany would be 28 years old today,” said Dianne Valiante, Tiffany’s mother. “She’d be a college graduate, a caring member of the community, and probably a member of law enforcement or the military herself. These were careers she dreamed of. We love her and miss her every single day.”
They are not alone. More than 12,000 people have signed a petition urging the New Jersey Attorney General’s office to reopen the case.
The episode of Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries that chronicled Tiffany’s story — Mystery at Mile Marker 45 — has drawn millions of viewers, many of whom emerged skeptical of the suicide narrative. In that episode, law enforcement declined to appear on camera, a silence that only amplified public suspicion.
Physical evidence has only deepened the doubt. Tiffany’s shoes and headband were found over a mile from the site of impact.
Her phone was recovered with a shattered screen. And an ax, discovered near the tracks by her family, was handed over to investigators only to vanish without explanation.
Witness statements, some contradictory, remain in dispute. What happened in those lost hours between Tiffany’s last known location and her death has never been comprehensively reconstructed.
Last year, the Valiantes filed a lawsuit claiming Tiffany was the victim of a gender-based hate crime. The parents say that those who investigated their daughter’s death misclassified it as a suicide without considering that she could have been murdered because she was a lesbian.
Their theory — that she was abducted near home, murdered, and placed on the tracks — has not been proven.
But neither has it been credibly refuted. A case that should have been treated with the highest scrutiny was, by many accounts, decided with unsettling haste.
The lawsuit, which, according to attorney Paul R. D’Amato, is believed to be the first filed under the state’s Crime Victims’ Bill of Rights, alleges Valiante was the victim of a hate crime based on a recent forensic review and the discovery of several hate-filled messages that were sent to Tiffany about two months before her death.
“Our comparative analysis of past and present data downloads of Tiffany’s digital devices expressly points to Tiffany as a target of ridicule, harassment, and threats because of her sexual orientation,” said Jason Silva, managing partner at Cornerstone Discovery.
The Philadelphia-based digital forensics company used a file system extraction to lead to the recovery of more than 100,000 pieces of information.
The absence of forensic rigor in the early hours of the investigation has come to define the case as much as the facts themselves. The rush to close it, the family argues, allowed vital clues to decay or disappear. In grief, they’ve become archivists and advocates, preserving timelines and evidence that institutions failed to treat with due care.
Michelle Amendolia, the nurse practitioner who pronounced Tiffany Valiente dead at the scene, spoke at the office of D’Amato Law Firm about her experience with similar fatality sites involving trains and the differences in the blood present at those scenes compared with Valiente’s.
And so, on another July evening, candles will again glow against the long shadow of unanswered questions. The volleyball net will be raised, as it has been each year, and the sound of laughter will mix with solemn remembrance. In a corner of the yard, where memory refuses to fade, the name Tiffany Valiante will once more be spoken — not only as a daughter lost, but as a question still waiting to be answered.