The Case Goes to the Jury

Alexavier "AJ" Pedrin was six years old when he died on February 11, 2023, inside a home where multiple adults had been violent, where the system had been warned, and where police had left him sleeping fifteen hours before he was found dead. Today twelve people in La Crosse County, Wisconsin walked out of the courtroom carrying the case. The State charged the girlfriend. The defense names the father. The jury decides whose story Alex's body and his brothers' voices belong to.

The trial that has run nearly twelve days closed today. Both sides put their best argument to the jury. The State took the last word. And before deliberations started, the judge spent over an hour reading the legal frame the panel has to work inside. I sat with this case from the first hour of testimony. I have watched every witness, every objection, every concession. What I want to do here is tell you where this case actually stands on the eve of a verdict, because the closings answered some questions and opened others that the jury will have to live with for as long as it takes to decide.

The Last Witness

The day did not begin with closings. It began with Sgt. Rich Amundson, the State's lead investigator, recalled to the stand for one final twenty-minute round of rebuttal testimony. The State had two narrow exhibits left to put up: a photo of the soft-fabric closet rack from Dikeman's bedroom, and a Cellebrite extraction of selfies she took at 9:02 PM and 9:19 PM the night Alex died. The closet rack matters because Dikeman testified the bag of medication was kept up high, out of reach of a six-year-old, and the State needed to anchor that. The selfies matter because they show a seventeen-minute window of grooming and makeup application while Dikeman texted her date for the next morning.

The State got both exhibits in. Then the cross arrived. Christopher Zachar took the same rack photo back, zoomed in on the visible sag in the fabric shelves, walked Amundson through the hangers that were not disturbed in any way consistent with a bag being knocked off, and finally asked the question the State never did. "Sergeant, do you have any way to know whether that bag was actually on top of that shelf on the day Alex died?" Amundson said no.

The bag-on-the-shelf premise is the foundation of the State's staging theory. The State argues the medication bag was placed within Alex's reach to make his overdose look like an accident a six-year-old discovered on his own. If the State cannot say where the bag actually was, the staging narrative does not lose, but it does not gain ground either. The selfies were cleaner for the State. The timestamps are real. The grooming is visible. The State will use that seventeen-minute window in closing, and Torbensen did.

The Jury Charge

After the State rested, Judge Elliott Levine spent more than an hour reading the legal frame the jury must work inside. This is the structural floor of the case, and what the judge ruled on this morning shapes every argument the jury will be allowed to consider. The verdict-form architecture got reworked mid-conference. The State's lesser-included offense ladder on Count One became four separate verdict forms. The defense secured four-person signature lines on Count Three's death-or-great-bodily-harm questions, with unanimity language requiring the jury to agree on the specific act that caused the death.

The instructions are roughly even-handed. Both sides got significant other-acts evidence in front of the jury. Both sides got specific limiting instructions on how that other-acts evidence can be used. But the architecture itself favors the State on Count One and the defense on Count Three. Three different paths to a homicide conviction means the State only needs to convince the jury on one. The unanimity requirement on the death-causing act on Count Three means the jury must agree on which specific abuse act killed Alex. The defense's reasonable-hypothesis instruction, which requires the jury to acquit if the evidence can be reconciled with any reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence, is the defense's structural anchor. Three paths to homicide. One unanimity gate. One definition of reasonable doubt that the entire defense closing was already built around.

The State's Case in One Hour

ADA Matt Torbensen delivered the State's closing. He opened with Alex. Not with the evidence. Not with the charges. With the child. Nine years, ten months, and four days old as of today. He would be finishing the fourth grade. He left a hole in his mother's heart and his father's heart. The trial process is about protecting the defendant's constitutional rights and proving that Dikeman is responsible for the abuse, the neglect, and the death. The State spent four sentences planting the human stakes before any evidence came back into play.

Then the closing did the work. Torbensen anchored the story to the 911 call at 9:25 AM on February 11. Before that call, Dikeman texted Rafael Suarez "Something is wrong with my son. Don't come." Before texting Suarez, she called her mother for fifty-two seconds. Her mother had to tell her to dial 911. The State framed the order of operations as a consciousness-of-guilt sequence: she contacted her date, she contacted her mother, and only then did she contact emergency services. Three minutes passed between the mother call and 911.

The staged-scene walkthrough was the closing's structural centerpiece. Every pill bottle inside the bag had the child-safety lock engaged. The pill bottle outside the bag held pills inside the bag that matched the prescription. Ten of twelve pills dumped on the inside of the bag. The State asked the jury to imagine a beaten and battered child finding a bag at an adult-only height, opening the bag, engaging the child-safety lock on every bottle, and ingesting only the Xanax at a level that would kill an adult. That story is not believable, Torbensen said. The defense is selling it anyway.

The Xanax timing closed the only-one-person-could-have-done-it window. Pedrin was arrested at 7:15 PM the previous night and was in jail when the drug would have taken effect. Both forensic pathologists agreed Alex had Xanax in his system after the beating, not before. Only Dikeman had the opportunity, the ability, and the bag of her own medication. Her own text to her mother, "Do you want to try a Xanax?", sits in evidence as her own statement that she had the drug and was willing to give it out.

The children got the rebuttal the State knew it would need. Major in two forensic interviews and again on the stand at age twelve described kicking, choking, hot sauce as punishment, the stairway fall and the leg-bending after. Brantley at five in a forensic interview and again at nine on the stand described the same patterns. The State pre-empted the defense reliability attack by framing the green water and the diamonds and the safe upstairs as exactly what a five-year-old observed. And the State leaned hardest on the two-homes argument: Major was at his father's house. Brantley and Aria were with Dikeman's family. Two separate homes. Two children. The same accounts of the same person.

Torbensen took on Derek Pedrin directly. Pedrin is violent with women. Pedrin is a domestic abuser. The trial often felt like a domestic-violence trial against him. He is responsible for the neglect, for not getting Alex to medical care on time, for bringing drugs into the home. He is not responsible for what Dikeman did. The smokescreen is the defense's strategy. Do not fall for it. Torbensen closed by quoting Dr. Endres's testimony that Dikeman avoids responsibility and projects blame on other people, asking the jury to give her a lesson in personal responsibility and find her guilty.

The Defense's Watchdog Frame

Christopher Zachar opened the defense closing on something the jury had already seen. A recorded van conversation between Derek Pedrin and Alex. Words a father said to his six-year-old son in anger. Words the defense played for the jury. The defense closing's structural premise is that this case has been about the wrong person from the first hour. The investigation defended a premature conclusion. The medical science does not support murder. Multiple reasonable explanations remain consistent with innocence.

The burden-of-proof opening was lengthy and load-bearing. Reasonable doubt is not "probably." It is not "more evidence of guilt than of innocence." It is not "a strong belief that something bad happened." The State must eliminate every reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence. The jury does not have to solve every mystery. They have to find one reasonable doubt. Just one. Overdose alone, if reasonable, defeats Count One and the death-causing-act path on Count Three.

Zachar walked the investigation's failures one by one. There was no single person in charge of the investigation. Lt. Williams was removed early. Sgt. Amundson was the "last man standing," and on the stand he conceded he had not read every report. A meeting with Derek Pedrin ten days into the investigation, discussing problems in the case and asking to see Pedrin's phone, produced no report. The defense only discovered the meeting from going through video evidence. Investigators never seized Pedrin's phone. Ever. Despite phones being, in Zachar's words, an alter ego. They got Dikeman's phone immediately, with her passcode, voluntarily. They never got his.

The DNA evidence got direct attention. The pill bottle was sent to the crime lab to test only for Alex's DNA. Alex's DNA came back. The crime lab specifically asked for comparison samples from other adults believed to be involved. They never got them. Pedrin's DNA was never tested. Dikeman's was never tested. The coach bag was never tested. The pill fragments on the pillow were never tested. The defense's framing was simple: the centerpiece of the staging case was never fully tested because investigators were afraid of what the answer would show.

The medical-science argument took the longest. Dr. Quinton could not determine the exact cause of death and could not rule out overdose. No fatal head trauma. No strangulation. The blood loss was not a fatal amount. The alprazolam level alone was high enough to kill an adult. The death was gradual, the defense argued, which is consistent with overdose and not with sudden homicidal rage. Dr. Lubinsky's "homicidal violence" wording, Zachar said, was the medical examiner playing police officer.

The children got handled carefully. They are sympathetic. The question, Zachar said, is reliability. Major's account of the attack changed across interviews. Brantley's mid-testimony "our mom" self-correction got the jury's attention. The "apology to dad for not telling the jury about the alcohol" detail was framed as Brantley letting slip something he was told not to say. And the November 2022 911 call from Dikeman herself, reporting Pedrin had punched her in the throat and strangled her over hamburger meat, saying Pedrin "did the same thing to his six-year-old," was the defense's strongest contemporaneous evidence. Captured in real time. Before anyone knew it would matter at trial.

Zachar closed on what justice requires. Justice is not vengeance. Vengeance is easy. Justice requires discipline. Requires understanding when the evidence does not provide a neat answer. The person who deserves punishment for what happened to Alexavier is not the person sitting at the defense table. The jury's duty is to walk out of the courtroom without ever having to wonder whether they convicted an innocent person. If they have that doubt, they have their answer. Not guilty on all counts.

The Conversion

Then the State got the last word. Seventeen minutes. And Torbensen used them.

He took the defense's burden-of-proof opening and redirected it. His favorite jury instruction, he told the panel, is the burden of proof. Because it says exactly what their job is. Their job is not to search for doubt. Their job is to search for the truth. That single sentence is the move that converts the defense's structural anchor into the State's frame. It is the kind of clean line that travels into deliberations and stays.

He took the tunnel-vision argument and reframed it. The investigation did not narrow because investigators ignored Pedrin. The investigation narrowed because Dikeman herself told them, that morning, that Alex was asleep the entire time Pedrin was home. Based on her word, Pedrin could not have committed the abuse. The defense never told the jury that piece. They lost probable cause to seize Pedrin's phone because of what she said.

He took the children's testimony and named the only two possibilities. Three children. Two separate homes. Major in his father's house. Brantley and Aria with their grandparents. All three pointed at Dikeman. None of them ever accused Pedrin of physical abuse to any of them. Torbensen called it magnificent coaching by some power from above that children in different homes could magically say the same thing. Unless that is exactly what happened.

The Xanax got resequenced. The only phone with a text about Xanax was hers. Pedrin admitted he illegally purchased it for her. The differential-diagnosis frame on the overdose theory was the rebuttal's medical answer to the defense closing. The practice of medicine looks at the entirety of the picture. Pills and toxicology alone are consistent with overdose. In the context of a beaten and battered child who is then drugged with enough Xanax to kill an adult, the picture removes Pedrin entirely. Only one person in the world could have administered drugs to that child.

The closer landed where it had to. Tell her you see her. Tell her you see her for who she is. Tell her you know what she did. Tell her she's guilty.

Where the Case Stands

The State left the courtroom in the stronger position. I am saying that as someone who has watched this case as a watchdog from the first hour, not as someone who wants the State to win. Both sides have legitimate arguments going into deliberation. Both sides know it. But the structural reality of the day is that Torbensen's rebuttal converted the defense's two strongest anchors, the children testified independently from two separate homes, and the staging walkthrough survived cross-examination of Amundson and never got a defense answer about the child-safety locks and the only-Xanax dump.

That does not mean the State proved its case. It means the State left in the stronger position than it might have. Reasonable doubt is real here. The defense closing delivered every load-bearing reasonable-doubt theme the evidence supported. Dr. Quinton expressly could not determine cause of death and could not rule out overdose. That finding does not disappear in deliberation. The November 2022 911 call is contemporaneous evidence Dikeman was being battered by the man the defense is naming as the alternative perpetrator, and that call did not get an adequate State answer. The Pedrin phone never got seized, and that fact also did not get an adequate State answer. The reasonable-hypothesis instruction is in the jury's hands now, and any one of those defense anchors, if a single juror finds it reasonable, defeats Count One.

Whatever the jury returns, the closings are the case's editorial peak. Each side told twelve people what the trial meant. The State performed its case. The defense performed its case. The State got the last word and made it count. The jury starts deliberating immediately. Judge Levine told them they can break at 5:30 in the evening if they want. The next session begins at 8:30 the following morning. The two alternates were drawn by random number after closings. The case sits with twelve deliberators.

Verdict watch is what the case looks like from here forward. I will watch the deliberation timeline closely. The longer the jury is out, the more likely it is that at least one of the defense's reasonable-doubt anchors landed for at least one person in the box. A short deliberation tells one story. A long deliberation tells another. A note from the jury asking the judge for a transcript readback or a re-reading of an instruction tells a third. Whatever shape this verdict takes, I will be on camera with the result and with what it means.

For now, the system has done what the system is supposed to do. Both sides got to argue. The judge instructed the jury. The case is in the hands of twelve La Crosse County residents who have sat through twelve days of testimony to answer one question: did the State eliminate every reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence?

The answer to that question is the answer to whether Josie Dikeman walks out of that courtroom a free woman or spends the rest of her life inside.