She Was 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐝 For Not Saying Sorry To Him On T...

She Was 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐝 For Not Saying Sorry To Him On Their Thanksgiving | HO”

She Was 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐝 For Not Saying Sorry To Him On Their Thanksgiving | HO”

Before anyone knew her name outside her circle, she was just Tashiana: vibrant, Jamaican roots, realtor energy, the kind of person who could talk a stranger into believing in their own next chapter. Born June 12, 1992, she built her adult life like she built her social media—out in the open, bright, busy, full of plans.

She worked real estate, but she also offered referrals for credit repair, weight loss help, and “a host of other things,” because she moved like someone who didn’t believe in standing still. She posted about her career the way some people post about sunsets—like proof that life could be beautiful if you chased it hard enough.

She met Dermit Blake, a Jamaican man serving as an active-duty soldier at Fort Carson. An Army radio specialist. A sergeant. Four-plus years in, disciplined on paper, steady to the people who saw him in uniform. To outsiders, he seemed loving and focused.

Together they dated, fell in, and married, and by the time their daughters came along, the family looked like a postcard: young parents, two kids, a townhouse in Colorado Springs, USA, and the kind of family photos that make relatives comment, “Look at y’all.”

“A loving husband,” people would say. “Beautiful children.” “Living the dream.”

But dreams can have paperwork.

On Facebook, Tashiana said they married in 2015. Court records later showed that by July 2019, they filed for divorce. Then, by October, it was dropped. Not finished, not resolved—just stopped, like a storm that pauses without leaving. That same day they filed, police were called to the home for a domestic disturbance. When officers arrived, both Tashiana and Dermit said it had only been verbal. No physical anything, they implied. No reason to go further.

But someone in the background told officers something different—that he had hit her. No charges were filed.

If you’ve ever lived through a relationship that looks fine in photos but feels like walking on glass at home, you know how a “dropped” case can mean “postponed” more than “over.” You know how families keep showing up for holidays because the kids deserve a holiday. You know how people say “we’re good” because the alternative is admitting you’re not.

On the night of February 20, 2021, the 911 call came from inside that townhouse. Dermit was the one who called. His words, as later reported, were brutal in their plainness: he said he had harmed his wife, and he said she was a “terrible person.” Officers arrived and found him covered in red. They put him in handcuffs. They moved fast because there were children in the home, and because every second inside a house like that can be the difference between saving a life and documenting a loss.

The girls were on the couch while adults in uniforms moved through their world. While questions were asked. While the air in the house turned cold in a way no thermostat can fix.

“Are you okay?” someone asked one of them softly, as if the right tone could undo what had already happened.

“I… I love my dad,” the older one said later, and that sentence did what it always does—made the room go quiet, made everyone swallow down the reality that love doesn’t protect children from what they witness.

And here is the hinge that people don’t want to touch, because it cuts: the same hands that buckle a child into a car seat can also become the hands a child fears in the dark.

Investigators did what investigators do when emotion can’t be allowed to drive the work. They interviewed the children. They reviewed doorbell camera footage. They built a timeline. They looked for the kind of truth that doesn’t need anyone to confess.

The older daughter said she’d been asleep when she woke to loud pops—sharp, unnatural sounds that didn’t belong in a hallway outside a bedroom. She said her father ordered her and her five-year-old sister to come out of their room. “Come out,” he told them, and in a child’s mind, a parent’s command is still a parent’s command, even when the tone is wrong.

When the girls stepped into the hallway, she said they saw their mother on the floor. She said her mother was soaked, and the sight was so frightening that her memory held onto it like a picture that won’t fade.

Then came the detail that would follow the case like a shadow.

The child said her father demanded an apology.

“Tell me you’re sorry,” he said, according to her account, and what kind of grown man turns a marriage into a courtroom in front of children? What kind of husband turns “sorry” into a test you can fail even after you say the word?

The child said her mother apologized. She said, “I’m sorry.” And the child said that after those words, her father delivered a final, devastating act to her mother’s head. She said there were more acts after that. She said it stopped only when one of the children begged him to stop.

“I wanted to call the police,” the older daughter said, “but I hesitated.” She loved her dad. She loved him even in the same minute she was learning he could take her mom away forever.

Police documents later indicated Tashiana had been struck six times, with an additional round hitting the drywall behind her. Six is a number that doesn’t sound real until you imagine the time it takes for six separate decisions to happen. Six is also the kind of number that makes “impulse” sound like a lie.

Dermit Blake was held without bond in the El Paso County Jail, charged with first-degree murder and two counts of child abuse.

At some point, someone in the family asked a question that had no clean answer: “How did we not see it?” And someone else probably answered, “We did. We just didn’t know what we were looking at.”

The hinge was no longer the hallway—it was the word “premeditation,” and how a jury would decide what lived inside that word.

The case went to trial. Dermit maintained a plea of not guilty. His defense didn’t paint him as blameless; instead, they pushed a different story about his state of mind. They argued it wasn’t fully planned, that it was a hasty impulse, a reaction fueled by drinking, the kind of moment that turns catastrophic and then can’t be taken back.

The prosecution argued the opposite: that what happened was deliberate. They pointed to the doorbell footage, and they described a window of about five minutes—five minutes in which decisions were made, repeated, carried through. Five minutes that would last two little girls the rest of their lives.

In court, the air is always too cold and the benches are always too hard, as if comfort is something you don’t deserve when you’re there to talk about pain. Family members sat with their hands clasped, knuckles white. Friends stared at the floor like it might open and swallow them away. A courtroom deputy called names. A judge watched faces.

During the trial in November 2022, the defense requested a mistrial. They said the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence that would have changed how Dermit would have been represented—information from Tashiana’s phone that allegedly suggested she had been having an affair. The prosecution countered that they had disclosed the phone data to the defense twice, and records showed the defense had downloaded it. They added, pointedly, that if an affair had played a role, the defense would have already known.

The judge ruled against the defense. No mistrial.

In closing arguments, Dermit’s attorney did not deny that Dermit was the one who ended Tashiana’s life. The focus stayed on whether the state had proven he planned it ahead of time, whether it should be reduced to second-degree murder or manslaughter instead.

Ten days. That’s how long the trial took before a 12-member jury reached a decision. Ten days of testimony, exhibits, pauses, objections, and the kind of silence that feels like the whole room is holding its breath.

Guilty of first-degree murder. Guilty of child abuse.

Life in prison, mandatory, plus two separate 12-month terms for the child abuse convictions.

When the judge asked Dermit if he wanted to speak before sentencing, he declined.

“I have nothing to say,” his silence seemed to offer, and the people who loved Tashiana heard that silence as one last refusal to give them anything resembling explanation.

The hinge, at the end, wasn’t the verdict—it was the children, and the fact that every legal outcome still leaves them with the same beginning: they watched their mother disappear in front of them.

People who spoke after the verdict said Tashiana was a bright light, the kind some men can’t stand because it exposes their darkness. Her family said he couldn’t handle it—that he wanted to dim what he couldn’t control. Friends shared what they missed: her laugh, her hustle, the way she showed up, the way she made you feel seen. They talked about her as a mother, the way her priority would always be her girls.

And the cruelest thought was the simplest one: in her final moments, her mind may have been on the kids. Not on herself. On what would happen to them if she didn’t get back up.

The girls are now being raised by their grandparents. The family has been carried, in part, by the kindness of neighbors and strangers, by the outpouring that comes when a community can’t make sense of a loss and tries to patch the hole with casseroles, cards, and presence. The funeral was bittersweet—closure in name, not in feeling. A moment to celebrate a vibrant life cut short, even while grief sat like a weight on every shoulder.

And somewhere in the middle of all that—paperwork, custody arrangements, therapy appointments, school drop-offs—small symbols start to matter in a different way. A magnet on a fridge. A holiday greeting. The kind of object you don’t notice until it becomes a marker between “before” and “after.”

If you asked people close to the Blakes what they would “pay back” to the world if they could, they might tell you: they’d pay back the belief that “sorry” keeps you safe. They’d pay back the assumption that a uniform guarantees stability at home. They’d pay back the idea that because you posted love, you must have been living it.

And here’s the hinge that lingers like a bruise: the warning signs aren’t always loud—sometimes they sound like laughter in a livestream you’ll later watch through tears.

Not long after, another story surfaced, another couple that looked steady until they didn’t, another community left trying to explain the unexplainable.

It was May 4, 2021, in the Warner Robins area of Georgia, and police were called to a home where a woman and a man were found in a bedroom, both with fatal injuries from a firearm. The victims were identified as Katherine Price, 36, a businesswoman, wife, and mother, and her husband, Timothy Price. The detail that stopped people cold was that Timothy had reportedly called police shortly beforehand and said, “I just shot my wife.”

Officers rushed there hoping to save a life. Instead, they arrived to a tense, uncertain situation. Timothy was still inside. They tried to communicate.

“Timothy,” an officer called, voice measured. “Come out. Let’s talk.”

No answer.

“Sir, we can help you,” another voice offered, louder now. “Step outside. Hands where we can see them.”

Silence.

The kind of silence that makes a radio crackle feel like thunder.

They treated it like a high-risk call because that’s what it was. A perimeter was set. A Special Response Team was brought in. Gas was deployed in an effort to force a surrender without more harm, the way law enforcement tries to end a volatile situation with as little irreversible damage as possible.

Still nothing.

At some point, decision becomes action. They moved in. The door came down. The hallway was quiet in a way that didn’t feel peaceful—it felt held back, like a breath trapped in the walls. Officers advanced, scanning rooms, calling his name again.

“Timothy!” a voice echoed down the hall. “Timothy Price!”

No reply.

They reached the primary bedroom. The door was slightly open. They pushed it wider.

Inside, they found both of them. Still. Gone.

A husband and wife found dead in their Centerville-area home, and a neighborhood turned into a crime scene. Crews stayed for hours on Arbor Creek as local police and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation worked to figure out what happened. To many watching from a distance, it looked like he had harmed her and then harmed himself, but investigators don’t stamp a story onto a scene before the evidence has spoken.

“If we go to a death investigation,” an investigator explained in a later statement, “we don’t go in with a preconceived notion… We work everything like it’s a murder until we can prove it’s not.”

Neighbors were interviewed. People stood outside with arms crossed against the morning air, eyes wide, voices hushed.

“What’s going on?” one neighbor asked, and the question was half curiosity, half denial.

“It wasn’t no bad relationship,” another said, shaking their head like the motion could erase what they were seeing. “We never heard anything like that.”

Someone else watched an ambulance arrive and leave with no one inside and couldn’t stand it.

“I had to walk away,” a neighbor admitted, voice cracking. “I didn’t want to see nobody’s parent having to feel that way.”

The couple, as far as the community knew, didn’t come with a public history of fights. Which is why the use of force surprised some, and why the outcome stunned them even more. People want patterns they can recognize, red flags they can point to, because it makes the world feel manageable. When there aren’t any you can name, fear spreads faster.

Katherine Price’s life, on paper and in memory, was full. Born in 1985 in Memphis, Tennessee, she grew up the daughter of Elizabeth May Jones and the late Eric Jones. She graduated from Northside High School in Warner Robins, class of 2003, remembered as personable and charming. She joined the United States Air Force, later served in the Georgia Air National Guard. She worked with Credence Management Solutions LLC and built her own cosmetology venture, Next Level Glam, the kind of side business that becomes a second identity when you love what you’re building. She was a devout Christian who attended Fellowship Bible Baptist Church, and her faith shaped how people saw her: grounded, family-focused, committed.

She met Timothy sometime around 2010. He ran a trucking business, drove 18-wheelers, and had a reputation for being steady. Together, they were seen as dependable and involved. People described them as generous, the kind who would show up for local events and help out when asked.

“What you tell her?” someone teased in a clip that floated around later, the way couples get teased when they look solid. “Classy,” someone joked back, laughter spilling over a moment that once felt harmless.

Then it went from one hundred to zero in the blink of an eye.

Investigators examined the home. They collected physical evidence. They ran autopsies. They dug through records—financials, communication logs, medical history—trying to build a full timeline, trying to find the thread that turns “normal day” into “unthinkable morning.”

In the bedroom, officers noted small details that felt almost cruel in their normalcy: a faint smell of spent gunpowder, a desk with papers, a half-open drawer with old photographs—Catherine and Timothy and their children in happier times. Birthdays. Vacations. Ordinary days at a park. Proof that a family can look intact right up until the moment it breaks.

Over time, after investigative steps and the medical examiner’s work, authorities concluded that Catherine and Timothy had been in a serious argument before the incident. Timothy harmed Catherine, called police, and then later took his own life. The church community grieved, calling them active members, remembering their friendliness. Locals talked about the shock, the confusion, the questions that don’t land anywhere.

And the hinge, for Warner Robins and for Colorado Springs alike, is the same hard truth: a home can look peaceful from the street while a storm is already inside.

In both cases, people were left asking what could have prevented it. What drove him to do it. What warning sign mattered most. What sentence, what moment, what choice could have changed the ending.

Some answers are legal: a guilty verdict, a life sentence, a case file closed. Some answers are social: conversations about mental health, about domestic violence awareness, about believing people when they hint at fear. Some answers are personal and private and may never be spoken out loud.

But if you listen closely, a different kind of evidence remains—the small repeated objects we can’t stop seeing. In Colorado Springs, it’s that little US-flag magnet on the fridge, the one that held up a child’s drawing during a Thanksgiving livestream, the one that later feels like a witness that never gets called. First it was decoration. Then it was memory. Now it’s a symbol, stubborn and silent, reminding everyone who loved Tashiana that patriotism and family values don’t mean a thing if home isn’t safe.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” she’d said, smiling into her phone.

And now, every holiday that comes after is measured against that moment—against the promise of normal that existed right up until it didn’t, against the five minutes the prosecution talked about, against the ten days it took a jury to name what happened, against the six times documented in cold paperwork that can’t hold warmth no matter how long you stare at it.

If there’s anything to “pay back” from these stories, maybe it’s this: the belief that apologizing is protection, the belief that quiet means calm, the belief that love, by itself, can stop someone who’s decided to take. And maybe the only way to honor the women at the center is to let the questions make us braver—braver about trusting instincts, braver about checking in, braver about taking a “verbal argument” seriously when the air feels wrong.

Because the flag magnet stays on the fridge long after the cameras stop rolling, and the silence that follows isn’t empty at all—it’s full of everything we wish we’d said sooner.