Stabbing victim's daughter: 'She would never hurt anybody'

Kali Hile stood outside 235 Lafayette St. in Tamaqua Thursday night, lighting candles and adjusting the silk flowers making up a makeshift memorial.

Just four days earlier, outside the same home, Hile witnessed the unimaginable — her mother being stabbed to death.

“I can’t unsee what I saw that day, but I can’t let that affect me. I’m going to remember her as the bubbly flipper I knew, as my mom,” Hile said.

Hile invited the media to her mother’s home Thursday night to dispel rumors spread by her husband, and talk about the loving mother of three she really remembers.

“She’s not a drug addict. She beat a 17-year addiction,” Hile said. “She would never hurt or harm anybody.”

Hile said her mother was getting ready to leave an abusive relationship, one that had been off and on for years.

She said that Robert B. Bailey, who was her biological father but was out of her life for many years, mentally and physically abused both she and her mother.

“She was ready to leave. He was abusive,” Hile said. “He basically said, if he can’t have her, nobody can.”

Their relationship, Hile said, was more like that of best friends than a mother and daughter. She fondly remembered watching funny movies on the couch, eating popcorn.

Hile said it was her idea to track down Robert Bailey when she was 18 years old, but her mother joined her and moved to North Carolina. It was there that Diane Bailey finally conquered the addiction to crack cocaine that plagued her by successfully completing drug court. Diane Bailey’s aunt, Alice Horton, said Diane may have suffered a single relapse at some point, but that she was in control of her addiction.

“She wasn’t a drug addict, she was a survivor,” Hile said.

Hile recalled that things started OK with Robert Bailey, but she quickly saw his dark side. She moved away, but eventually reunited with her mother and father back here, after Diane needed bypass surgery.

Despite their blood relation, Hile says she no longer considers Robert Bailey her father.

“I want nothing to do with him and I hope he rots in jail. I’ll never forgive him.

Hile said that Sunday was not the first time Robert B. Bailey stabbed someone close to him. She said he stabbed a former wife and her mother. He served five years in prison for that crime.

She expressed shock that Bailey was allowed to go free after that incident.

“I’m going to do everything I can to keep him in jail,” she said.