❤️HER NAME IS TATIANA (TANIA) DOKHOTARU ❤️
In the weeks after he murdered her, his family and friends bombarded me with messages saying she killed herself.
Her name is Tatiana (Tania) Dokhotaru. She was murdered by her former Danny Zayat at her home in Liverpool on May 26, 2023. She was only 34.
Tatiana was the 22nd Australian woman killed in 2023. That year we lost 74 women to femicide. The toll of femicide has continued to rise year on year.
Zayat subjected Tatiana to extreme abuse throughout their relationship. And when she left to keep herself and her daughter safe, his violence and torture escalated as it so often does.
He stalked and intimidated her relentlessly – her little apartment should have been her safe haven but he made sure there was no peace or hope.
At one point Tatiana texted a friend saying: “I was fighting him off, I tried calling the cops and he said he will kill me if I do.”
On that last evening, she called Triple Zero, telling the operator he was bashing and robbing her but she never got to finish the call.
Zayat grabbed the phone and threw it from the balcony of the 22nd-floor unit.
Three minutes after the call, he was caught on CCTV leaving the scene.
He returned to the home 20 hours later and police were contacted.
He cried in front of the cops, feigning innocence and saying: “I can’t believe she’s done that to herself”.
Not only did he deny killing Tatiana, people close to him set out to paint Tatiana as a drug addict who died by overdose. The influx of messages blaming Tatiana to my own social media accounts was beyond the pale.
It is astounding, despite all the evidence and all the years of abuse one juror insisted he was not guilty, holding out against the other 11 who chose to convict.
Zayat has just been jailed for 24 years with a non-parole period of 18 years.
Tatiana wanted to move to Canada to be with her family, but her loved ones feared legal consequences for her.
So she had to return to Australia – and today, even though none of this is their fault, her family carries great guilt on top of their grief and their trauma.
“If we had known that it would lead to this … we absolutely would have found a way at any cost to hide her in Canada,” her stepdad, Denis Thievin, told the court.
“We will carry that guilt for the rest of our lives.
“Never had we fathomed that any human being could be so inhumane and so heartless with someone that we love so much.”
Denis says Tatiana’s mum Olya Dokhotaru, raised her daughter to be extraordinary and to ‘have remarkable courage’.
Her murder, Denis said, destroyed everything good for Olya.
“An only child cannot be ruthlessly deleted from your life without leaving a feeling that you’ve been robbed of pretty much everything.
“Now more than two years since the brutal murder, I still hear crying regularly in the bedroom that Tatiana once occupied.
“I can almost guarantee that I’ll find Olya in the foetal position with items of clothing to her nose, breathing the familiar scent of a beautiful soul she’d known better than anyone in the entire world and sobbing uncontrollably over the horrible, unnecessary event that changed our lives forever,” he said.
TATIANA (TANIA) DOKHOTARU MATTERS ❤️
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