Trinity Backus, the 16-year-old missing girl discovered dead in Northern California last week, had taken drugs and began acting strangely before fleeing, according to her aunt.
Ashley Bjorklund, 34, told The Post in an exclusive interview on Monday that her niece had “done acid” with a friend who was staying the night.
Backus went missing Thursday after leaving Bjorklund’s house in Nevada City late Wednesday. The next day, she was discovered dead just half a mile north of where she was last seen.
The teen’s body was discovered in a densely forested area. There were no signs of foul play, according to law enforcement, and the autopsy has yet to be completed by the Nevada County coroner.
Bjorklund told The Washington Post that she and her boyfriend — whom she identified only by his first name, Logan — went to bed around 9:30 p.m. last Wednesday, while Backus and her friend remained awake and watching TV.
“Perhaps [around] 9:50 [or] 10:00, Trinity comes to our back door, opens it, and begins yelling,” Bjorklund explained.
“She says, ‘You guys need to get out of the house because it’s going to blow,” Bjorklund explained. “I have an open fireplace; Logan and I both thought the house was on fire.”
“I went out there and looked, but nothing was wrong — the fire’s fine, the house’s fine,” she explained.
“And Trinity is yelling, ‘Everyone get outside, there’s radiation, I can see the radiation,'” says the narrator.
Backus, according to Bjorklund, was yelling from her back porch. Because it was a cold night, she asked her boyfriend to go outside and bring Backus in.
But the adolescent had fled, she claimed. Backus was dressed in only her pajamas and socks, according to her aunt.
“He was back in the house in about three minutes.” “And he said to me, ‘Ashley, I can’t find her,'” she explained.
“She’s got to be messing with us,” Bjorklund speculated. She claimed she and Logan spent 15 minutes searching her fenced-in two-acre property before calling Backus’ mother, who came running over.
The group quickly decided to call the cops, who detained Backus’ friend, Hannah.
“That’s when we discovered the girls had done acid,” Bjorklund explained. “Hannah told us they’d taken two acid hits each.”
Bjorkland questioned the admission because the couple didn’t appear inebriated that evening.
“I’m 34,” she explained. “I can tell if someone is high off their gourd — she wasn’t high off her gourd.”
Backus’ friend, however, claimed that they had also decided to smoke from a bong after Bjorkland had gone to bed.
“That’s when it set off the episode,” Bjorklund explained.
“We don’t even know if what she took was acid,” she continued. “There’s a lot of garbage on the streets these days.”
“I’m not sure how she died. I’m not sure if she died of an overdose — I’m not sure. She took her clothes off right before she died; I’m not sure if she had hypothermia.”
“All night long, we were screaming all over this mountain,” she said.
Leave a Reply