All Toryn Buckman wanted was to be a princess, says the 4-year-old’s grandfather.
But her Phoenix home wasn’t fit for a princess. In the final days of her life, it became more like a dungeon.
When she died on May 31, her injuries were so numerous, so severe and so gruesome, the doctors who saw her described them as the product of torture in official reports.
Paramedics found Toryn dying on the floor with scald marks on her genitals. Her nipples had been torn off.
To police, relatives described a home with hushed voices, blinds always closed. A place where secrets were kept, where Toryn wore long pants and long-sleeved blouses to hide her injuries. A place of violence.
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The last time Toryn’s grandfather, Ruben Arangure, who lives in Maine, saw her was on a video phone chat in March, about the time of Toryn’s birthday. She told him she wanted a princess bed.
“She was a very bright girl. She did all her ABCs and numbers,” he recalled. “She was always happy, always fun.”
Toryn was born in rural Maine in 2008 to Ashley Arangure and her longtime boyfriend, Joe Buckman. They got married three months later. They were in love, said Ruben Arangure. But Joe would stay out late with his friends and Ashley would get lonely.
Within a year, Ashley Buckman had enough. She and a sister returned to Arizona, where they spent their early childhood. It was the last time Arangure saw his granddaughter alive.
In Phoenix, Buckman told a relative about her risky sex life with dangerous men.
That was one of the many warning signs relatives recalled to police during their investigation, as detailed in the official report. Their accounts in those records depict a turbulent home.
She met Edwards through an online dating site. He moved into the apartment where Buckman lived with her sister, Crystal. At first, Edwards seemed like a nice guy, Crystal told police, but before long, she noticed Edwards spanking Toryn. When Crystal complained in early 2010, Edwards packed his bags and told Buckman he’d leave if she didn’t kick out her sister.
That was the last time the sisters saw each other. But other relatives came by and saw trouble, they told police after Toryn’s death.
In March 2012, a cousin came by to give Toryn a doll for her birthday. The one-room apartment was littered with dirty diapers. The family of four — Edwards and Buckman had a daughter together last December — all slept in one room on a pair of mattresses on the floor. There were no sheets.
Buckman confided to her cousin that she spanked her daughter with a hanger and Edwards used a belt.
In late May, one week before Toryn died, an uncle visited and noticed the girl wore long sleeves and pants. He noticed her lips were purple and swollen.
Arangure had never visited his daughter in Phoenix, never met her live-in boyfriend, whom he figured was just another in a string of romances.
In April, he and Buckman talked on the phone. She told him she knew he still socialized with Joe Buckman, to whom she was still married.
About 10 minutes later, Arangure’s phone rang again. Edwards left a message threatening to kill him and warned he’d never again see his daughter and Toryn alive. After Toryn’s death, Ruben Arangure gave a recording of the call to Phoenix detectives, police reports confirm.
On May 30, shortly before 9:30 p.m., an emergency call came in about a girl in cardiac arrest. Police found Edwards and Buckman calm in their apartment. Toryn lay motionless on the floor without a pulse. She had fallen in the bathroom, the couple said. She was the “clumsiest girl in the world,” Buckman said, according to police reports.
But police and paramedics noticed a litany of injuries, some fresh, some healing. She had a cut on the back of her head, scald marks, a bruised jaw, a broken rib, numerous marks that could have come from being whipped by a cord.
A Phoenix Children’s Hospital doctor who saw her reported the wounds “can be characterized as torture.” In the emergency room, doctors resuscitated her. But she had no brain waves and couldn’t breathe on her own. She died the next day.
“I didn’t do anything,” Edwards told the officer who arrested him.
Buckman told police everything happened while her sister, Crystal, was babysitting, while Buckman worked at a nearby Walgreens. Police said they had established that Crystal wasn’t there.
The story changed throughout the night. Buckman denied noticing most of the injuries, then said the scald marks came from a reaction to medicine. Buckman said her “hand acted before her brain” sometimes, then later that bite marks on Toryn came from “possibly a spirit,” because the girl saw ghosts.
Later in the interview, she said she did smack Toryn in the mouth and caused Toryn to fall. She blamed it and other injuries on clumsiness.
Police said they knew about “the whooping paddle,” a board taped with screws. She said she never used it, but admitted hitting Toryn with hangers. Police found a bloodstained hanger on the sofa.
During his police interview, Edwards started out blaming Crystal. He told police he left discipline to Buckman, that he’d been wrapped up in YouTube and put his headphones on every time Toryn needed disciplining.
Later in jail, Buckman told a CPS caseworker Edwards repeatedly struck Toryn in the back with his knee and threatened to kill the girl if Buckman quit her job. CPS reports the agency never investigated any prior abuse on Toryn.
But police interviewed employees at a Phoenix ultrasound clinic who saw the family in 2011 and had noticed bruises all over Toryn’s body. They told police that staff called the CPS hotline and reported abuse. CPS told police they had no record of the call, and repeated that account in an e-mail interview with The Republic.
Arangure is trying to get custody of his 10-month-old granddaughter Whisper, who has been in foster care since Toryn’s death.