3T

3T Interview One

Article Headline: The Jackson Three
Article Date: November 27, 1995 Vol. 44 No. 22
Article Source: People Magazine

FOR TAJ, TARYLL AND T.J. JACKSON, childhood didn’t play itself out like a scene from Valley of the Hollywood Brats. Far from it. Tito Jackson’s sons, whose circle of famed relatives includes Uncle Michael and Aunt Janet, say they enjoyed a downright normal upbringing. “Our parents were strict when they needed to be, and they trusted us,” Taj (born Tariano) says of Tito and Delores Martes Jackson, who divorced in 1993 after 21 years of marriage. “My mom made sure that we had a real childhood, with birthday parties, baseball, family outings, all that stuff.”

Thus grounded, the “three T’s,” as their mother fondly called her sons, were preparing to launch their own singing group, 3T, last year when their family was struck by tragedy. On Aug. 27, 1994, between recording sessions for their debut album, Brotherhood, Taj, now 22, Taryll, 20, and TJ. (Tito Joseph), 17, received a predawn phone call from the daughter of their mother’s boyfriend who said Delores had been in an accident. Hoping she wasn’t seriously injured, the boys arrived at the Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, Calif., and asked her doctor how she was doing. “She’s dead,” he replied tersely.

Shocked and grief-stricken, the brothers at first did not contest preliminary findings that their mother’s death was accidental. The boyfriend, L.A. businessman Donald Bohana, 59, told police that he and Delores, 39, had been swimming that night at his house in Ladera Heights. After going into the house briefly, Bohana told investigators, he returned to find Delores’s body at the bottom of the pool. But three months later her sons’ growing suspicions about the circumstances of her death—their mother, they knew, could not swim—were confirmed when the L.A. County district attorney’s office reopened the case following a coroner’s report that numerous contusions, lacerations and abrasions found on her body suggested she was the victim of a “non-accidental…assisted drowning.”

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Tagged as: 1995, 3T, Age 32 - 41 1990 -1999, Articles, grandchildren, Jackson Tito, Kardashian, Mag: People Magazine, WAGS Wives and Girlfriends

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