Riley's Daddy Heard From

Interview with Riley Ann Sawyers' father

From the Article

He choked back tears repeatedly as he remembered her Thursday, but he told TODAY it was important that people knew what kind of person she was, and how he will always remember her.

“I wanted to get her story out, to let everybody know she was loved, very loved up here in Mentor, Ohio,” he told co-host Meredith Vieira. “She was just a darling little girl that something this tragic shouldn’t happen [to] nowadays.”

Yup. She was loved, all right. Loved right out of your life and down to Texas so her mother and ugly stepfather could torture her, kill her, and dump her in the bay.

The 20-year-old Sawyers and Trenor had begun dating when both were 16-year-old high school students. When Riley was born on March 11, 2005, in the Northeast Ohio town of Mentor, the couple moved in with Sawyers’ mother, Sheryl Sawyers.

This is why teenagers shouldn't be having sex. They have NO CLUE about consequences. I don't care how much the hormones are racing! Do kids not learn where babies come from?

Two years later, the relationship came apart, and Sawyers told Vieira he still doesn’t understand why.

Because little Miss Fly-by-night was sick of living with you and your mama and wanted to live in the world of internet gaming dreams. To bad that when she got there, it turned out to be more of the same. I wonder what made her think that the so-and-so she met on the internet would be better than the one who was at least trying to look after his girlfriend and child.

‘Hard for people to understand’
Even after he and Trenor broke up, he spent a lot of time with his daughter along with his mother and his new girlfriend, who he has since married; he and his wife have a 3-month-old son.

So, by the time Riley was a year and a half old, you had already knocked up another girl? This goes beyond the realm of "accident" and well on into "deliberate stupidity."

But in May of this year, Trenor failed to deliver Riley for a scheduled visit, and Sawyers asked local courts to order Trenor to obey the custody agreement. At least two court summons sent to Trenor were returned unopened, the second on Sept. 19.

Sawyers would later learn that Trenor had moved to Texas in June to move in with and marry Ziegler, whom she had met on the Internet.

So that's it? You didn't follow up? You didn't search her computer to see what she had been doing or who she had been doing it with? No Pipl.com? ZabaSearch? Nothing? I can understand if you can't afford a private investigator, but you should have done SOMETHING! Or were you just as happy to have her and the child out of your life? How could you allow this, otherwise?

Sawyers couldn’t talk about his daughter without choking up. Asked to describe her, he said, “She’s very fun, extremely hyper and she loved acting.”

She was TWO! There's not a whole lot more that you can say about a two-year-old, except that she had the potential for being a wonderful person; a potential that came to an end amid terror and pain.

“How do you want her to be remembered?” Vieira asked.

“As a beautiful, loving little girl — there’s nothing more else to her than that,” he said, fighting back tears. “She’s beautiful, loving and touches your heart the second you meet her.”

"Nothing more else?" So when did you drop out of school?

So beautiful and loving that you just let her mother walk her out of your home, out of state, and out of life, period.

Can we not manage to teach these kids to use birth control when they play at being grown up?

Mr. Sawyers, do you think that a marriage license will keep this "baby-mama" from moving on?

A bit of advice: get your own place, and quit living with Mama. If you are young enough that Mama still needs to be taking care of you, you're too young to be raising babies of your own.

That is a "Duh!"