Said the woman who masterminded the murder of her adoptive father.
Teen who plotted attack on parents: 'I regret all my decisions'
Teen who plotted attack on parents: 'I regret all my decisions'
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Twenty months ago, police officers took Tia Skinner to jail.
Just 17, she knew she was facing life in prison for plotting the attack that killed her father and critically injured her mother.
"I regret everything," Skinner, now 19, said in an interview from the Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility, her first comments since her arrest. "I regret all my decisions."
Paul Skinner, 47, died Nov. 12, 2010, after chasing attackers Jonathan Kurtz and James Preston out of his home. Mara Skinner, his wife, suffered more than 25 knife wounds.
Since being sent to a state prison near Ann Arbor, Tia Skinner said she has not heard from her mother, her siblings or anyone else from the close-knit Yale community near Port Huron.
"It's been rough. It's hard losing your whole family in a blink of an eye," she said. "It's tough because that's my family; they're supposed to stay by you through thick and thin."
She was adopted by the Skinners as a child and is Mara Skinner's biological niece. She said her biological mother has contacted her, but they do not have a relationship.
Skinner said her parents' opposition to her two-week relationship with Kurtz was the reason she plotted to murder them.
Skinner drew a map of her neighborhood and diagram of her home to lead Kurtz and Preston to the bedroom where her parents were sleeping. She left a ground-floor window unlocked for them to enter and placed knives on her bed.
Skinner said she didn't see her dad chasing them from their house but heard his screams as her older brother, an emergency room nurse, tried to save him.
"It sounded awful to me; it literally made my heart break in two to hear my dad like that," she said. "I think it was just awful -- I just had a bad temper, and I took it out on somebody who didn't deserve it, somebody who looked after me and took care of me."
She said when she was told Paul Skinner had died, she was devastated.
A Michigan State Police trooper testified during Skinner's trial that she showed no emotion afterward.
Skinner said she hopes the community knows she is sorry for her role in the attack.
Although life in prison is difficult, Skinner said, she takes it one day at a time with the hope she will be freed. She is appealing on the grounds that she was interviewed by police as a minor without parental consent and had ineffective counsel.
Kurtz and Preston, both 18 at the time of the attack, also were sentenced to life in prison.
Skinner said she hopes to request a new sentencing. A recent opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding mandatory life sentences for juveniles will allow her a chance at freedom before she dies. She turned 18 less than a month after the attack.
She said she believes 20 years would be a proper sentence for her role in the attack.
"I believe that everybody deserves a second chance in life," she said.
"The whole point of being alpha, is doing what the fuck you want.
That's why you see real life alphas without chicks. He's doing him.
Real alphas don't tend to have game. They don't tend to care about the emotional lives of the people around them."
-WIA
