The Suspicious Death of Haley Cheney

It was late on the night of December second, twenty twenty three, heading into the early morning hours of December third, at a home in Little Elm, Texas. Inside the house, Sara had already been tensioned. Twenty four year old Hailey Cheney was there with her boyfriend, the father of her baby, along with members of his family. At some point that night, an argument broke out. Not a brief disagreement, not something that quickly passed. Something had escalated. A voicemail would later capture part of what was happening inside that home, and by the time Hailey's family realized something was seriously wrong, they were already on their way there. When they arrived, Hailey's sister got out first and walked up toward the driveway. That's when she saw the car door open. Inside the passenger seat was Hailey. She was unresponsive, There was blood everywhere, and what happened inside that home before her family arrived, what was captured in the moment's leading up to that scene is where this case becomes far more complicated. Hey everyone, and welcome back to Case Uncovered, where we uncover the most compelling and lesser known true grime cases. I'm your host John Rivera, and today's case is one that, on the surface, was given a clear answer, a conclusion that came quickly, a narrative that for many seemed straightforward. But when you slow it down, when you look at the details and you listen closely to the people who were closest to Haley, that answer doesn't feel as simple. Because this isn't just about how Hailey Cheney died. It's about everything that led up to that moment, what happened in the minutes before, and what may have been missed after. I had the opportunity to speak with Haley's aunt, Jackie, who was very close to Hailey and has been advocating for her niece ever since her death. She has spent months reviewing reports, going through footage, and working to understand exactly what happened that night. Throughout this episode, you'll hear directly from her, because understanding Haley's story means understanding both what is documented and what still doesn't fully make sense, and the question her family is still asking, what really happened that night? This is the suspicious death of Hailey Cheney. Now, before we go any further into what happened that night, before we walk through timelines, reports, or anything that came after. We need to start with Hailey because Hailey Cheney is not just a name connected to a case. She was a person. She was a daughter, a sister, and a brand new mom. At twenty four years old, Hailey was in the season of life that, for a lot of people is about figuring things out, balancing independence, relationships, work, family, trying to build something that feels stable, even when life itself doesn't always feel that way. But for Haley, there was something else at the center of it all. Her son. He was just six months old at the time of her death, and from everything her family shared, everything about Haley's life had started to revolve around him, the way she spent her time, the decisions she was making, the future she was trying to build. When I spoke with Haley's aunt, Jackie, someone who was incredibly close to her, that's one of the first things that came through, not just that Hailey loved her son, but how deeply she loved the people in her life. She was just a bright light, like she literally did not meet a stranger. Her favorite saying when greeting someone was hello, beautiful, Hey, beautiful. It was always beautiful and that was one of the things I incorporated into her eulogy when I did her eulogy at her funeral, because that was like her big thing. Listening to Jackie describe Hailey, you don't hear someone talking about a person who was distant or disconnected. You hear someone talking about a woman who was present, someone who showed up for people, someone who made an impression on others, not because she was trying to, but because that's just who she was. She greeted people with hey, beautiful, and it wasn't just something she said, it was something people remembered. That kind of detail might seem small, but it tells you something about a person. It tells you how they moved through the world, how they interact with others, and how they make others feel. Jackie also talked about the impact at Hailey had on people, even outside of her immediate circle, friends, coworkers, people who had crossed paths with her at different points in her life. Her funeral was packed because she just impacted so many lives. And what's crazy is her justice page that I run. She's literally still. Impacting people's lives. Like I have women reaching out to me about their personal stories and just people saying that like they feel like they knew her and. That they're just supporting her, that they love her. And this is like people from South Africa that I have no clue who they are, you know, like just all these people reaching out. So Hailey was incredibly, incredibly intelligent. She was super duper smart, and she just loved to help people. Some of the character statements that we got, you know, there were things that I learned too. But some of these people were really bad times of their lives, enthralled in addiction, and Haley helped them. Walk through it. So she just she would give the shirt off of her back for anyone. Some of those people reached out after Haley passed, sharing stories, sharing memories, talking about the ways she had helped them, sometimes during some of the hardest moments of their lives. And that's something that comes up again and again when people talk about Haley. She showed up for people. Even when she had her own challenges, her own things she was working through, she still made space for others. At the time of her death, Haley was working at the Crayola Experience, a job that, from everything her family shared, fit her perfectly. She loved kids, She connected with them easily, and being in an environment where she could interact with families and children on a daily basis that really mattered to her. At the point of her before she passed away, she was working for Crayola Factory. Hailey was absolutely amazing with kids, absolutely amazing. Working at Crayola Factory was a really good position for her considering she got to work with kids. And I actually made the call to Crayola Factory after Haley had passed away, and her boss, whom she only worked with probably just a few months, she lost it like she was just so upset about hearing of the passing of Hailey. She just said the same thing. She was just like a. Light in the room. And one of the things that she said, which was when I was asking for people to say things about Hailey who necessary didn't necessarily want to stand up at her funeral, but I told them I would add it to the eulogy. It was a general consensus that she gave the best hugs, and she really did the second oldest of Lindsay's girls, which is Taylor. Taylor is just not very lovey dovey, and Hailey would force her to give her like a real hug. So Taylor wanted to do like a side hug or something. Haley's like, no, no, bring it in. So that was just her things, like just personal touch was like her thing. But her old boss, Raina just I still to this day speak with her and it was a huge loss. It just goes to show how big of an impact Hailey made in lots of people's lives in a short amount of time. Even in a short amount of time, she left an impression there too. Her boss remembered her, her coworkers remembered her because Haley wasn't someone who blended into the background. She was someone people noticed, not in a loud or attention seeking way, but in a way that made people feel something. Hailey was incredibly close with her family, her mom, Lindsay, her sisters, her nieces and nephews. She stayed connected with them, She talked with them often. They were a steady part of her life, especially during this season as a new mom. Jackie described them as tight knit, protective, the kind of family that could argue one minute and have each other's backs the next. She absolutely loved her family, her sisters and her mama and her grandma that you know, and her nieces and nephews that those were her people, and she absolutely adored them. They thought like sisters do, but they definitely called themselves a fat five and they were a ride or die like no matter what, they be at each other's throats in the next minute, at somebody else's throat. For coming after one of them or something. So she was just a bright light and absolutely beautiful inside and out. And I just, oh, my gosh, I want to cry, just I wish you could have known her. And every time I talk about all these beautiful. Things about her, I just a miss her. They had a bond, which makes what happened next that much harder to understand, because while Haley was building her life and raising her son, working and staying connected to her family, there was another part of her life unfolding at the same time, a relationship one from the outside that may have looked like she was trying to make work, but behind the scenes was more complicated than it appeared. At the time of her death, Haley was in a relationship with her son's father, and from the outside it may have looked like she was trying to build something stable, something consistent, especially for her child, because that was important to her. She wanted her son to have a family, She wanted things to work. But the reality of that relationship wasn't as simple as it may have appeared on the surface. Haley wasn't living in just one place. She was splitting her time. Part of the week she was at her mom's house, where she had support, where she had family, where she felt grounded, and the other part of the week she was traveling over an hour away to stay at her boyfriend's home. So Hailey was living with her mom and her sisters before she passed away, and the baby was with her too. She was with her mom it was about four days a week, and then the baby's father. He lived over an hour a ways, so she would travel to him, of course, because he would not travel to her, and she would travel to him, and her and the baby would stay there at his family's residence for about three days out of the week. That home wasn't just him, It was his family, his parents, his brother, his sister in law, their children, multiple people all under the same roof. And that dynamic matters because it means that when we talk about what happened that night, we're not talking about a situation where two people were alone. There were others present, others who were part of that environment. From what Jackie shared, Haley was trying to make that relationship work, not because everything was perfect, but because she wanted stability for her son. She wanted a family unit. But there were signs that things weren't always healthy in that relationship. Not necessarily things Haley openly talked about all the time, but things that came up in conversations, things that in hindsight stood out. Hailey wasn't really open about her dating relationships. She had confid confided into her mom a few things. She would make jokes saying, which a lot of people you know will do this, Like they'll make jokes like, oh, my boyfriend will kill me if I do that, or my husband will kill me. It wasn't her husband. I'm just saying, in my instance, I would be like, oh, my husband will kill me if I did something like that. She would make jokes like that. She'd did confide in her sister that she was a little bit worried some things that were going on with her and her boyfriend, as far as him being kind of controlling. There were concerns about control, concerns about pressure, and concerns about the environment she was in when she was there. And then after Haley passed, when her phone was accessed, those concerns became clear. Jackie described going through Haley's phone and finding messages that showed patterns of behavior, language that escalated quickly, threats, and instability. After she died, the police never even went through her phone. They collected it, but they never went through it. They didn't have the code to it. I figured out the code to it, because you know, I knew her so well. I figured out the code and I was able to get into her phone, and I did a lot of digging in her phone and found lots of messages that their relationship was actually incredibly toxic. It was a lot of him threatening to physically harm her if she left him. One time, she was bringing up a scenario to him about somebody else and custody and stuff, and he got angry and he was like, I'll take our kid and I'll run off to Mexico. They'll you know, called loss. Tell him I'm armed and dangerous. Like, just lots of messages of him just threatening her. Other people in her life their son, just threat after threat. What I did was I took the word kill and I searched it in her phone, in her iPhone, and dozens of messages popped up of I'll kill this person, I'll kill that person, I'll kill the county, I'll kill the doctor. I'll kill myself, I'll kill you, I'll kill her son, I'll kill my brother, I'll kill your sister. I mean, just it. I had a dream about killing somebody and going to prison. I had a dream about killing somebody and getting away with it, like I'll dig your ex up and I'll kill them again. Like I mean, it's just like the obsession with kill. Immediately, the red flags went off with me, like I was like, something psychologically is not right with this person. They did not have a healthy relationship. That's not opinion. That's documented, And again this doesn't tell us exactly what happened that night, but it does give context to their relationship. It shows that things weren't calm all the time, that there were moments where things escalated, that there was tension beneath the surface. In the weeks leading up to December third, that pattern of going back and forth between homes continued but there was one difference the length of time Hailey stayed. Around Thanksgiving, Haley stayed longer than she normally would. Instead of a few days, it stretched out closer to a week, and according to Jackie, this was the longest stretch of time Hailey had stayed there. That detail might seem small, but when you're looking at timelines, when you're trying to understand patterns, changes like that are important. Right before she passed, it was around Thanksgiving and she stayed a little extra longer at her boyfriend's house. It was the longest stay she had actually ever had there, and it was I think around to a week, if not a week, very close to a week, or maybe even a little over a week. I think it was. I think it was almost Sunday to Sunday, and she was planning to go home the next day. So this was I can't remember, but she was going home the next day. Whatever day of the week it was, she was planning to go home the next day. She was texting with her mom because they were going to finish up personas shopping. She said her mom some of the things that she wanted for Christmas. In fact, she actually sent her a pair of shoes that her mom ended. Up buying for her funeral. There were also conversations about expectations about where Haley would live and about what her future was supposed to look like. She was complaining to her mom that she felt like his family was kind of pressuring her to find a place out there, and she really wasn't ready for all that because of the fact that she had literally just restarted her relationship with her boyfriend throughout her whole pregnancy. He was not there two weeks he said he didn't want to be a dad. Two weeks before her scheduled induction, he came back in and he was like, listen, I want you to meet my parents. And he scheduled like this dinner with his parents, and he didn't show up. He was at work. So Haley begged her sister to go with her because she just didn't want to go by herself to meet her parents by herself, which I thought was incredibly odd, like why would you meet somebody's parents for the first time. I don't know, it's just really weird, But she did. She ended up going to meet his parents. Obviously they're the grandparents of her child, so she did end up going to meet them, and they kind of started re establishing their dating relationship. Haley's goal and dream, because she grew up in a broken home, was to try to establish a stable home life for her son, and she had a sacrificial heart, and so I think I don't think I know that was her goal. From what Jackie shared, there was pressure for Haley to move out there permanently, to relocate and to build her life around that environment, but Hailey wasn't ready for that. She still had her family, her support system, her life where she was, and that created tension. It's also important to understand where Haley was coming from. She grew up in a broken home and because of that, she wanted something different for her son. Because Hailey wanted stability, and she really desired a family unit. That desire can sometimes lead someone to stay in situations longer than they otherwise would, not because they don't see the problems, but because they're hoping things will work out. By the time we get to the night of December second, everything that had been building beneath the surface was already there. The tension inside that home hadn't just appeared out of nowhere. It had been forming over time, through conversations, expectations, pressure, and the kind of relationship dynamic that from the outside may not always be obvious but internally can feel overwhelming, and that night it reached a point where it could no longer be contained. At some point during the night, a voicemail was left, and that voicemail becomes one of the only pieces of real time insight into what was actually happening inside the home, not through reports or through secondhand accounts, but in the moment itself. There was a voicemail that was left on Lindsay's phone from the boyfriend's phone, and you could hear Hailey arguing with him and his family, specifically his mother, and she's telling her. She's telling his mother give me my EFN son back, and she's like, I did. I told you to sit down, and Haley said, I've been sitting down. Your son is a bee. Your son is a bee. And then the mom's like, quit talking to me like that. Heley quit talking to me like that, and Heley's like, I swear to Efen and then it cuts off, like the recording cuts off. What you hear in that recording isn't calm, It isn't controlled It's the sound of a situation that has already askedalated. You can hear the urgency in Haley's voice, the emotion, the distress, and it gives you a glimpse into just how intense things had become in those moments. There was also ring camera footage, and according to Jackie, that footage captures parts of what unfolded outside the home in the minutes leading up to everything that followed. In the footage, Haley can be seen outside the house. She appears visibly upset, emotional, overwhelmed, moving in a way that Jackie described as not quite steady, not quite herself. This was before Haley's family arrived. There's two videos. The first video shows it shows the sister in law going out to Haley's car and getting in Haley's passenger's seat, closing the door and out of frame because there's like this nutcracker in the way, you can hear Haley and Haley's like, she tells her, I don't care. They can forget about the money be they're not going to keep my f and chop for me, and then she goes into the house. Then the next footage shows Hailey come out of the house, and she's got this very asthmatic breathing, very clearly upset, and she's just going OOO. And she sits down on the porch and she has her iPhone on her because the iPhone makes a notification that she had received a text message. Then the next camera footage, it shows a Haley on the porch again crying, and the sister in law comes out and she says, you dropped your phone. My question is in between those videos, there's no footage of Hailey ree entering the house. So she's got her phone, and I think it was like at trying to think of the time frame. It was twelve fifty three am. She was on the porch with her phone. Twelve fifty five am. The sister in law is bringing her her phone, but there is no camera footage in between that. Twelve fifty three and twelve fifty five. If Heley ran entering the house, but she would have had to because she dropped her phone. Sister in law says, your mom texted you. Heley says no. She says you dropped your phone. Heley says, I don't give a fuck. And then the sister in law says, your mom texted you. And Heley either says I don't care or I'm scared. And then the sister in law gives her phone and she goes to walk back inside. Mind you, when she first went out to give Heley her phone, she's on Hailey's left side. Something catches her attention, the sister in law, and she closes the door and she goes to Haley's right side, and she's real. Quiet for a while, and then I say a while. It was probably like twenty five seconds or something, and then all of a sudden, she says, quit moving. Who And then Haley says, I don't give a fuck, and Helee's stands up. She's walking with like really weird gait. She gets to her car door, kind of misses it just by a fraction, grabs the car door, pushes it open, turns, bends down to get in the car, bumps her head really loud, like so loud. You can hear it on the ring camera. Sits back in the seat, kind of leans back, and then she slumps to the left. Ten minutes prior to Haley's family is showing up. The sister in law of the boyfriend actually goes out to the car and the video shows her. She walks out to the car, doesn't say a word. She walks out to the car, She's got her hands on her thighs. She peeps over the door, doesn't say a word, turns around, smiling, and walks back into the house. Never once said Haley, all right, okay, nothing just nothing, absolutely nothing. And then the next footage is her sister's showing up. In the next two footages of ring camera footage, she is in the same position. Her car door is in the same position. Is like she ne never removed. What the footage shows is important, but just as important is what it doesn't show. There's no clear visual moment of a gun being fired. There's no direct view of what happens inside that car once she's seated, and that gap, that missing piece of visual confirmation, becomes one of the earliest places where questions begin to form. When you start placing these pieces together, the voicemail, the footage, the movement toward the car, a timeline begins to take shape, and according to Jackie, that timeline moves quickly from the moment Haley gets into the vehicle to the point where emergency services are contacted. The window of time is relatively short. At the same time all of this is unfolding, Haley's family is already on their way, driving toward the house, trying to get there as quickly as possible, trying to understand what they're walking into without fully knowing what they're about to see. And when they arrive, everything changes. Hailey's sister gets out first and walks towards the driveway. She sees the vehicle. The door is open, and inside the passenger seat is Haley. She's unresponsive and covered in blood. It's a moment that doesn't require explanation because everything about it speaks for itself, and then, almost immediately a statement is made. She shot herself. It happens quickly before a full assessment, before the full scope of what happened is understood. That conclusion enters the situation very early on, and that is important not because it tells us what happened, but because it shows how the situation began to be interpreted from the very beginning. From there, everything moves forward. Emergency responders arrive, law enforcement is called, the scene begins to be processed, and within a relatively short period of time, a narrative begins to take shape. One that would ultimately lead to an official conclusion. After Haley was found in the passenger seat of the vehicle, everything shifted from a moment to an investigation. Emergency responders arrived first, and according to the ambulance record, when they reached Haley, she was unresponsive. She had what's described as agonal breathing, meaning her body was still trying to breathe, but she was not conscious. She had a gunshot wound to the right side of her head, and the amount of blood at the scene made it difficult for responders to manage her airway. They worked to stabilize her, they attempted to intubate her. They did what they could in those moments, her condition was critical. They get there and Taylor, because there was so much going on, Lindsay really was like, Taylor, can you just go up and handle this? And so Taylor gets out of Linday's car, goes up to the house, and she sees that Haley's car door is open, her passenger door, and she would have to walk by Haley's passengers. So when she first walked up, you know, she saw Hailey's arm kind of dangling, and then she's seen the blood and then she there's ring camera footage of this, and she's telling the boyfriend's mom there's blood all over her, and the boyfriend's mom's like what. And then Taylor's like, there's. Blood all over her. And the mom's like walking up to the car and she looks over the car door and she's like, oh my god, Oh my god, call the police. She shot herself. So right there is like a huge red flag to me. You've got Taylor who just found her. According to the boyfriend's family, they just found her at the same time that Taylor did. But Taylor's words are there's blood all over her. But the mom immediately goes to, oh my god, she killed herself. She shot herself. You know, it could have been that she was in her car and somebody came up and mugged her. I mean, you know what I'm saying, like, how do you know that? But her sister doesn't, And her sister was on the other side, Like her sister was literally right up on her. You know. The mom never even came on the other side of the door closest to the seat. She stayed toward the front of the car. So then Taylor walks towards Lindsay's car and she's. Like, mom, Mom. Well, by that point in time, Lindsay kind of knew something wasn't right, and so she was already getting out of the car because she's like, what is taking so long? And she's already getting out of the car, and Taylor's walking up to Lindsay and she's like, Mom, she's bloody, she's bleeding, she's bloody. And then Lindsay's like, what you know again, like I said reiterating, Taylor just knew that she had blood. She didn't know where the blood was coming from. She just knew that she had blood all over. So Lindsay gets up there and there is a lot of yelling between the families because immediately they were like, you know, Hayley's family was like what happened to her? And there's a lot of yelling and stuff like that the family by that point in time. The boyfriend's brother calls No One one and his No One One call was at one am. Lindsay's was at one oh one. But it was not a minute difference. It was a few seconds difference. Because I have the ring camera footage, it was literally seconds. So Lindsay calls nom on one, Lindsay tells No One one, please come help, my daughter is bleeding. The boyfriend tells, No One one, my brother's girlfriend shot herself. And then the dispatcher's like, do you know where and he said looks like looks like in the side of her head. He never even went out to the car. That's another huge like red flag, like how is it the family she's in company with who claims they literally found her at the same time as her family who just arrived, knows where she shot, how she's shot, like they know everything, but her family only knows she has blood all over her. During the NOM one one call, there's still argon like the boyfriend's brother is acting like he is in a like a bar fight argument like he is just steady. No no, no, no no. There's cussing from both sides. They're just the whole time. They're like, we've got a camera here and a camera here, and they're pointing on their porch to a ring camera that's by their door, and they're pointing to a surveillance camera that is up in the corner of their porch and they're like, we got a camera. We didn't do nothing on her. She'd been out here for forty five minutes. Nobody touched her. At the same time, law enforcement was arriving and beginning to process the scene, and according to the police report, Haley was located in the front passenger seat of the vehicle outside the home. A firearm was recovered at the scene. The weapon was identified as a Ruger LCP three eighty. Additional items were documented, including a shellcasing, and ammunition. And that becomes important because that firearm didn't belong to Haley. Based on statements shared by her family, it was not a weapon she owned or was known to carry. According to Jackie, that gun came from inside the home. We did not know Hailey to own a gun. The Haley's grandmother, when she called the boyfriend to let him know that she had passed away, he told her that he gave her that gun for protection, So that gun came from that household. Whether it was given to her and she had it in her vehicle or not, he said he gave that gun to her, which means she did not purchase that gun on her own. That doesn't tell us what happened, but it does tell us where the weapon originated. The medical findings confirmed that Haley had sustained a gunshot wound to the head, and according to the documentation, the bullet did not exit. It remained within her head. Now that detail is often something people focus on, but it's important to understand what it does and what it doesn't mean. In firearm injuries, whether a bullet exits the body depends on multiple factors, the type of weapon, the ammunition, the angle, the distance, and how the bullet interacts with bone. A retained bullet by itself doesn't determine distance or intent, but in this case it becomes part of the larger picture because when you're trying to reconstruct what happened, every detail matters. The ambulance comes, She's still breathing by the way. They get her. They take her to the hospital, and she passed away. For almost five hours later. No one from the boyfriend's family ever came to the hospital, ever called to check on her. Nothing. It was twelve hours later Haley's grandmother contacted the boyfriend and let him know that she had passed away. I can't tell you that heally was murdered. I can't because the police didn't do their jobs. They just didn't investigate. They did not do any type of forensics whatsoever other than obviously an autopsy, until about a year and a half later when I contacted the medical examiner and was like, I don't understand how you can make a ruling when you have no evidence, like you know, like I mean, obviously you can tell me where she's shot. Obviously you can tell me where the bullet was in her brain, but you can't tell me how it happened. That's the police department's job. And they didn't do anything. They didn't even do ballistics the gun that they had at that point in time. Scientifically, nobody could say that was the gun she was even shot with. But they did do ballistics, and that was the actual gun, and according to the lab that did the ballistics, everything worked well in the gun, which is kind of odd because the gun was loaded. And racked back when it was found. And for the listeners who may not know what that means, that means that the gun, when you pull the gun at the top to. Load it, that. Whole top part the slide was slid back, which usually only happens if you manually do it, or if there's no bullets left in the magazine. But there were four bullets in the magazine. There was a casing down the driveway. Obviously Haley had a bullet in her and then there was an unspent bullet in her driver's seat, So that's the six bullets. That magazine holds six bullets. The gun could have hold seven if there was one chamber. But we always found that kind of odd that the gun was found wrapped back. And this is where the investigation begins to raise questions because alongside what was documented, there are also things that, according to Jackie's review of the case, were not done. One of those is gunshot residue testing. According to Jackie, Hailey's hands were not tested for GSR. There was no testing done on the vehicle and no testing done on others present at the scene. That detail is really important because GSR testing is one of the most basic tools used to determine whether someone has recently discharged a firearm, and without it, that piece of the reconstruction is missing. The toxicology report also provided additional context. Haley had a blood alcohol level of zero point one seventy three. There was THHC present. An act emtaphin or tylanol was also detected. That tells us that she had been drinking. It tells us that she wasn't fully sober, but it doesn't explain what happened. Based on the scene, the evidence collected, and the findings at the time, Haley's death was ruled a suicide, and officially that's where the case stands. But when you take all of these pieces together, the scene, the footage, the timeline, what was documented and what wasn't, it doesn't necessarily bring clarity. It raises questions. When you start putting everything from that night together and really walking through it step by step. There are parts of this that don't fully make sense, not because we don't have information, but because when you line it all up, certain pieces don't sit the way you'd expect them to. One of the first things is the timing from the moment Haley is outside that home to the moment she gets into the car. That's the moment everything changes. It happens within a very short window of time, and when something that significant happens that quickly, you have to be able to account for each part of that sequence, how it started, how it escalated, and how how it ended where it did. Because even if one part of that timeline doesn't quite line up, then the entire sequence deserves a closer look. There's also what we know about those final moments and what we don't. We know there was an argument inside the home. We know that a voicemail captured part of that. We know that when Haley was outside, she was emotional, she was upset, she wasn't in a calm or steady state. And we know that she made her way to the car after that. But once she's inside that vehicle, that's where the clarity starts to drop off. There isn't a full, uninterrupted account of what happens in those moments, and that creates a gap in the sequence, not speculation, a gap in what can be clearly accounted for. There's also the question of the weapon. This wasn't something Haley owned, it wasn't something her family knew her to carry, and based on what was shared, it came from inside the home, so the weapon itself was already part of that environment. Then there's the investigation, because in cases involving a firearm, there are certain things that are typically done to help determine exactly what happened, and according to Jackie, some of those steps weren't taken at all. The police didn't do their jobs. They didn't do any GSR testing on anyone, not Haley, not her vehicle, not anyone else. When I reached out to the captain and I was like, you know, they swarn us that they were going to DSR test her at least, and he was like, well, if the gun goes off, then obviously you know she's gonna have GSR. And I'm again, no GSR testing was done, not on Haley, not on the vehicle, and not on anybody else that was present during that time, So there really is no way to confirm who actually discharged the weapon. And then there's everything surrounding that night, the relationship, the tension that had been building, the environment inside that home in the hours leading up to everything that followed. When you take into consideration all of the pieces of this case, there are just still so many parts that aren't fully explained, and those are parts that continue to raise questions, and when those questions don't have clear answers, the next step is trying to understand what those possibilities look like. Based on everything we know at this point, there are only a few ways to look at what happened that night, and each one comes directly from the same set of facts, the same timeline, and the same pieces we've already walked through. The first is the official conclusion that Haley's death was the result of a self inflicted gunshot wound, that in those moments, whatever was happening inside that home, whatever led up to it, ended with Haley taking her own life. That is the determination that was made, and that is how the case is officially classified. The second possibility comes from the parts of this case that don't fully line up. The timeline, the gap in what can be clearly accounted for when she's inside the vehicle, the fact that the weapon came from inside the home, and the steps in the investigation that, according to Jackie, weren't completed. When you take those pieces together, it raises the question of whether there was more happening in those final moments that wasn't fully captured or reconstructed. And then there's the broader context, the relationship, the tension that had already been building, the environment Haley was in that night. Because when something happens in the middle of an already escalating situation, that context becomes part of how everything is understood, and it raises the question of whether what happened that night was influenced by more than just a single moment. All three of these possibilities come from the same place, the same evidence, and the same unanswered questions, and the reality is, without certain pieces of information, there are parts of this story that may never be fully explained. What we do know is who Hailey was. A daughter, a sister, a someone who showed up for the people in her life, someone who is building something, and for her family. This isn't about theories, It's about understanding what happened to someone they love. Hailey's aunt, Jackie, continues to advocate for her, continuing to ask questions and looking for clarity to make sure Haley's story is heard. While this case is not currently an active investigation, Haley's family is still searching for answers. There is a Justice for Hailey Cheney facebook page where you can go follow along on that journey and support her family. There's also a petition on change dot org to reopen Haley's case, and I'll make sure to include all the links in the show notes below. For Haley's family, this isn't the end of her story. They're still advocating for her and still trying to understand what really happened that night, because what they're looking for isn't just an answer, it's the truth. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Case Uncovered. I want to personally take a moment to thank Hayley's aunt Jackie for trusting me and working with me to help bring you Hailey's story today. If you want to continue hearing cases like Hayley's, make sure you're subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you haven't already, please take a moment to leave a five star rating and review. It's one of the best ways to support the show. This podcast is free to listen to, but a lot of time, effort, and resources go into producing each episode, and your support helps me continue telling these stories and reaching more people to follow along with the advocacy work I do through the Regnited Project. You can visit the Reignited project dot com. And until next time, stay curious, stay vigilant, and stay safe out there. The word