5-year-old recounts attack that left his 11-year-old brother dead and his mother injured: ‘I saw blood everywhere’

Hours after his older brother Jayden Perkins was stabbed, a five-year-old boy sat in a small, colorful “talking room” and described how his mother’s ex-boyfriend entered the room Edgewater apartment and “ravaged” the 11-year-old Perkins and his mother.

“I saw blood everywhere in my house,” the boy told a child rights defender, recounting the home invasion and assault that erupted almost immediately after the child rights defender’s introduction.

“He wanted to kill my mother…he stabbed her.”

Jayden’s accused killer Crosetti Brand, who is representing himself, is also charged with attempted murder in the stabbing death of her pregnant mother. Brand sat next to three sheriff’s officers in Judge Angela Petrone’s courtroom Monday, his eyes moving from a video monitor at the far end of the courtroom to a stack of papers he was moving around in a folder. Directly behind him sat a half-dozen of Jayden’s relatives, staring through the tinted glass window that separated the courtroom from the gallery, muttering and cursing every time Brand spoke.

The March 13 attack came a day after Brand was paroled after serving eight years of a 16-year sentence for attacking another ex-partner. The indictment of Brand, who was under a court order to stay away from Jayden’s mother and was convicted of violence against women, has led to a shakeup on the state prison review board, with the board chairman and another member resigning in March.

Brand, whom the boy identified only as “his mother’s ex-boyfriend,” came to the house around 8 a.m. as the boy and Jayden were getting ready for school.

The boy described Brand “raping” his mother and brother, a word he said he took from a news report, apparently about the attack on his mother. Wild, said the boy, “means when someone gets stabbed.”

The tape ran for about 25 minutes, with several long pauses as the attorney left the room to discuss the interview with a team of investigators and prosecutors watching behind one-way glass. He described Brand as “creeping up” at various points in the interview and when his mother opened 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 for my mother.”

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 appeared to have been unaware that Jayden had died. The boy described his mother’s injuries and told the child rights activist: “That’s why she’s in the hospital. “She’s doing better, and my brother is doing better too.”

Brand argued that the video should not be admitted into evidence, questioned whether the child was present and pointed out that police and fire reports he viewed did not list the boy as a witness or victim. The boy had also spent the hours between the attack and the questioning with relatives and police.

“When a person is 5 years old, they pick up things that are said by people around them,” Brand told the judge. “Every child can be convinced as a 5-year-old.”

Judge Petrone said she would make a written decision at the next hearing in the case on June 10.

Brand also had no success in getting Petrone to appoint him a private attorney to advise him, conduct investigations and serve subpoenas – services that Petrone said would be available to him if he would allow her to appoint him an attorney from the office of Cook County Public Defender.

Brand insisted he would only accept help from a private attorney “due to the sensitivity of my case” and his concern that a public defender would somehow tell prosecutors his trial strategy. “That’s why I represent myself, so I don’t get sold out.”