- GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING
Jurors broke down in tears after being shown harrowing video of a murdered seven-year-old girl asking a FedEx driver who had abducted her where they were going.
Athena Strand could be heard asking Tanner Horner, 34, ‘Where are you taking me?’ during footage played in a Fort Worth courtroom Thursday afternoon.
The little girl then talked to Horner about her teacher and her school in footage shot on a dash camera on the day of the November 2022 murder.
She grew increasingly frightened when the truck stopped, Fox4 reported.
Multiple jurors sobbed during Thursday’s hearing, while family members were so traumatized by the footage that they left the courtroom.
A horrific photograph displayed last week showed Athena kneeling close to Horner in the truck as he drove her to her death.
He snatched the youngster from her home in Paradise, Texas, while delivering a parcel of Barbies her father and stepmother had bought for her Christmas present.
Horner admitted capital murder hours before his trial was due to start, and a jury is now tasked with deciding whether he should be executed.
Ahead of the footage being shown in court, Judge George Gallagher warned people in the courtroom to leave if they did not wish to see it.
‘If you think you cannot watch it or listen to it, leave now. Now’s your time to get out,’ Gallagher said.
Athena’s parents, Jacob Strand and Maitlyn Gandy, have both testified in the trial but they did not sit in the courtroom while the video was played.
The full footage showed Horner arriving at Athena’s house. He walked past the driver’s side window to deliver parcels and Athena walked behind him.
He opened the truck while the child stood close by, and he then picked her up and placed her inside the truck before closing the door.
Horner can be heard whispering something and moving Athena from the back of the vehicle to the front.
The terrified child then asked him: ‘Are you a kidnapper?’ She repeated the question several times later in the footage.
Horner told her to sit down, and threatened to hurt her if she screamed. As this was shown in the courtroom, several of the little girl’s relatives left.
Athena asked the trucker where they were going, and he told her to sit down, before covering the camera in the truck, meaning only audio could be heard from that point.
Horner can be heard making small talk with the child by asking her age, where she goes to school, her teacher’s name, and whether her teacher was nice.
She answered the questions then told him she had a sister. Horner then told Athena, ‘You’re really pretty. You know that?’
The truck can be heard halting, before Athena asked: ‘Is this your house?’ Horner replied: ‘No, I don’t live around here’.
When the little girl asked where he lived, he said: ‘Far away’.
After a few moments, the truck appeared to start then brake again, as the child asked: ‘What are we doing?’ to which Horner told her to ‘hang out for a minute’.
Horner then asked the child to remove her shirt, and she said ‘no’ before asking for her mom.
The following moments are harrowing – as the child could be heard crying and screaming while a banging noise rang out.
Some of the jurors began sobbing at this point, and the audio recording stopped as the court paused for lunch.
Horner, an independent contractor working with FedEx, killed Strand on November 30, 2022.
According to an arrest warrant, Horner told authorities that he strangled Athena after accidentally hitting her with his van while making a delivery.
Horner said that Athena wasn’t seriously hurt after he hit her while backing up, but he panicked and put her in his van.
He then strangled her to death in his truck, and her tortured final moments were captured by a microphone in his vehicle after he covered a camera inside.
Horner claimed to police that he tried to calm Strand down, but when he was unsuccessful, a sort of alter-ego of his he called ‘Zero’ ‘kind of took over’.
‘He (Zero) told her, ‘Just get in the back of the van, we’re going to go to the hospital,” Horner said.
Horner said Zero killed Strand.
‘I didn’t do it, but he did, and that’s what f***s with me… I’m wondering who the hell’s been in my head this whole time,’ he said.
‘Part of me is in denial because I didn’t pull the trigger,’ Horner said.
‘You feel like Zero pulled the trigger?’ Investigators asked, to which Horner replied in the affirmative.
‘I tried to disarm the gun. I tried to stop all of this from happening,’ he said.
The warrant said Horner took investigators to where he’d left Athena’s body.
In opening statements, Horner’s attorney Steven Goble told jurors: ‘When someone’s brain is what’s injured, you don’t see it.’
Goble acknowledged that the evidence against Horner was ‘overwhelming’ and ‘terrible’.
But he also told jurors that Horner’s mother drank while she was pregnant, that he has autism and suffered from ‘various mental illnesses throughout his life’ in addition to being exposed to a ‘massive amount of lead.’
Goble asked jurors to sentence him to life in prison.
Ashley Strand, Athena’s stepmother, told jurors that the package Horner had dropped off was a Christmas present for Athena — a box of ‘You Can Be Anything’ Barbies.
Strand, who has since divorced Athena’s father, said Athena enjoyed living out on their land in the country, where she got to ‘run wild and free.’
The trial was moved from rural Wise County to Fort Worth after Horner’s attorneys argued that he would not have received a fair trial.
