Hours after his 11-year-old brother was stabbed to death, a 5-year-old boy sat in a small, colorful “talking room” and described the “savaging” attack that also critically wounded their mother.
“I saw blood everywhere in my house,” the boy told a child advocate, his account of the home invasion and attack gushing forth almost as soon as the advocate introduced herself.
“He was about to kill my mom. … He was stabbing her.”
The ex-boyfriend, Crosetti Brand, has been charged with the murder of Jayden Perkins and the attempted murder of his pregnant mother.
Brand, who is representing himself, sat in Judge Angela Petrone’s courtroom Monday beside three sheriff’s officers, his gaze moving from a video monitor across the courtroom to a stack of papers he shuffled in and out of a folder.
Seated directly behind him, glaring through the tinted glass window separating the courtroom from the gallery, were a half-dozen of Jayden’s relatives, who muttered and cursed each time Brand spoke.
The March 13 attack occurred the day after Brand was paroled after serving eight years of a 16-year sentence for attacking a different ex-partner. The charges against Brand, who had been under a court order to stay away from Jayden’s mother and had been convicted of violence against women, have led to a shakeup at the state Prison Review Board, with the board chair and another member stepping down in March.
Brand, whom the boy identified only as his “mom’s ex-boyfriend,” came into the house about 8 a.m. as the boy and Jayden were getting ready for school, the boy said.
The boy described Brand as “savaging” his mother and brother, a word he said he picked up from a news report, apparently about the attack on his mother. Savaging, the boy said, “means when someone is getting stabbed.”
The tape ran for about 25 minutes, with several long breaks when the advocate left the room to discuss the interview with a team of investigators and prosecutors who were watching from behind one-way glass. He described Brand at different points in the interview as “sneaking in” and his mother opening the door to let him in.
The boy repeatedly mentioned how much he loved Jayden.
“My brother is so nice to me,” he said. “He was trying to cover my mom.”
After the attack, the boy’s mother grabbed his ankle and told him to call his father. At the time of the interview, the boy seems not to have known that Jayden had died. Describing his mother’s injuries, the boy told the child advocate “that’s why she’s at the hospital. She’s getting better, and my brother [is getting better] too.”
Brand argued that the video should not be allowed into evidence, questioning whether the child was present and noting that police and fire department reports he had viewed did not list the boy as a witness or victim. The boy also had spent the hours between the attack and the interview with relatives and police.
“When a person is 5 years old, they pick up on things … being said by people around them,” Brand told the judge. “Any child can be persuaded as a 5-year-old.”
Judge Petrone said she would issue a written ruling at the next hearing in the case June 10.
Brand also was unsuccessful in seeking to have Petrone appoint him a private attorney to advise him and conduct investigations and serve subpoenas — services that Petrone said would be available to him if he allowed her to appoint him a lawyer from the Cook County Public Defender’s Office.
Brand insisted that he would only accept help from a private attorney “due to the high-profile nature of my case” and his concern that a public defender would somehow make his trial strategy known to prosecutors. “That’s why I represent myself, so I don’t get sold out.”
