The Dikeman Verdict. Guilty, But Not As Charged.

The Dikeman jury was given the case Thursday afternoon. They returned a verdict Friday afternoon. About seven hours of deliberation split across two days. Three guilty verdicts on three felony counts.

And every headline I have read this weekend has buried the same fact under the word "guilty."

The jury did not convict Josie Dikeman of what the State charged.

On Count One, the State charged first-degree intentional homicide. The jury came back with first-degree reckless homicide. That is a lesser-included offense. It is a different mens rea. It is the difference between "she meant to kill him" and "she created an unreasonable risk of death she should have known about." The first is a life sentence. The second is up to 60 years.

On Count Three, the State charged physical abuse of a child, repeated acts causing death. The jury came back on the special verdict and found great bodily harm. They did not find death. That is the same jury, on the same verdict form, in the same courtroom, looking at the same body, and saying yes she abused him, but no, we are not saying her abuse killed him.

Three guilty counts. Two material reductions inside the conviction.

The First Note

Before the verdict, there was a note.

The case went to the jury Thursday afternoon. By late Thursday, the foreman sent Judge Levine a written question. Two requests.

One, the first forensic interviews of all three children. Major, eight years old. Brantley, five. Aria, four. Three small kids, taped by an interviewer two days after Alex died.

Two, three specific clips from the welfare-check body cam. The night a La Crosse County deputy walked into that house, looked at six-year-old Alex Pedrin on the couch with a broken leg and a scratched eye, and walked back out.

They did not ask for jury instructions. They did not ask for any expert testimony. They did not ask for the autopsy. They did not ask for the EMS run sheet, the toxicology, or the medical records that anchored the State's first-degree theory.

They asked for kids and for a cop. That is what they wanted to see one more time before they decided.

WATCH: DAY 12 SEGMENT Back To The Couch: Dikeman Jury Wants To Rewatch The Night A Deputy Saw Alex Alive | Pt 41

What The Jury Watched Friday Morning

Friday morning the court spent almost two hours playing it back. Six pieces of evidence, replayed in open court, before the jury went back to deliberate the rest of the day.

The body cam. A deputy at a window looking for Derek Pedrin, the boy's father, who was on a felony bond with a no-contact order to that house. The deputy talks his way in. He sees Alex on the couch. He sees the broken leg. He sees a cut above the eye. He asks. He gets the story about the desk at school. He notes the inconsistency. He goes back out. He has a conversation with another officer about a warrant.

Then Derek walks back out front. The deputy goes inside a second time. The eye story changes. The leg story is now from a tumble down the stairs about a month earlier. The deputy keeps asking. And then on his way out he tells Josie Dikeman the line that will live in this case forever.

Hours later, by the State's own theory, Alex was dead.

Then came the children.

Major, the eight-year-old, said his mother kicked Alex while he was lying down the night before he stopped breathing. He described a paddle hidden somewhere private. He had been asked weeks earlier on the stand about the same things; the jury asked to hear his original interview, recorded two days after.

Brantley, the five-year-old, gave the same kind of testimony independently. The paddle in the secret place. Money. Guns. A spoon. He said he heard Alex crying the night before he died. He also said his brother turned into a monster after drinking poison water from the drain. Five-year-olds do not narrate cleanly. The jury watched the whole thing.

Aria, the four-year-old, gave the defense its strongest single sentence. "Dad always kicks my mom." She specified. She said it happened while her mother was holding the baby. Then the interview ended with the interviewer asking how Alex died, and the four-year-old answering "I don't want to remember."

WATCH: DAY 13 SEGMENT What The Dikeman Jury Watched Before They Decided: The Brothers, The Sister, The Deputy | Pt 42

What That Sequence Tells You

Three children, in two different homes, telling versions of the same story. Their mother hit and kicked Alex. Their father hit and kicked their mother. Two patterns of violence in the same household. The State wanted the jury to focus on one. The defense wanted them to see both.

The jury asked to see the children one more time, and they asked to see the deputy one more time, and then they came back with a verdict that says yes she neglected him, yes she abused him, yes he died in her care, and no, the State did not prove she intended to kill him, and no, the State did not prove her abuse is what killed him.

That is what the request and the verdict tell you about each other.

The Bond Hearing

The verdict was read just after 3:00 on Friday afternoon. Judge Levine polled every juror on every count. Twelve jurors, three counts, thirty-six confirmations. Then the court accepted the verdicts and ordered a pre-sentence investigation with sentencing in roughly 60 days.

Then he announced he was revoking bond.

Chris Zachar stood up to argue. Bond compliance throughout the case. No infractions. No flight risk. And then he made the argument that is going to follow this case all the way through the appeal.

Zachar did not say his name. He did not have to. Anyone in that courtroom knew. The State asked for remand. The court remanded. Josie Dikeman left in custody.

Then the defense put four more things on the record.

One. Dikeman invokes her Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to silence. No law enforcement officer or agent of the State will question her while she is in custody pending sentencing.

Two. The defense moves that the PSI not contain a specific sentencing recommendation. They cited the anchoring effect and they cited State v. Gallion, the Wisconsin case that requires sentencing courts to explain their reasoning on the record. The argument is that a PSI recommendation pulls the eventual sentence toward whatever number the agent wrote down. The defense wants that anchor out.

Three. The defense will advise Dikeman not to cooperate with the PSI agent. This is the standard move when post-trial litigation is coming and there is no upside to talking.

Four. There are exculpatory reports the defense says it has not received. Three witness interviews. And the laboratory testing of, in the defense's own words on the record, "the substance which proved to be sucrose."

That last word is the one that should make you sit up.

Sucrose

The State spent this trial telling the jury that one of the substances found near Alex's body was Xanax. The toxicology came back positive for a benzodiazepine. Their theory was that Dikeman drugged him. Then on Day 11, the defense fought to put on Dr. Aaron Konkol, the analyst who tested the substance. Judge Levine kept that testimony out. Konkol's lab result, according to what David Bolles said on the record at the bond hearing Friday, was sucrose. Sugar.

That is not a small thing. That is a piece of evidence the jury never heard about, and that the defense has now put on the verdict record on its way up. If there is a Konkol report and it says sucrose, every appellate brief in this case is going to start there.

WATCH: DAY 13 VERDICT Named From The Bench: Defense Says The Real Person Responsible Just Walked Out Free | Pt 43

Where This Goes

Sentencing is roughly 60 days out. The PSI is ordered. The defense has signaled non-cooperation. The State will write something. The court will read it. Levine will sentence. The defense will appeal.

The biggest exposure is on Count Three. Physical abuse of a child, repeated acts causing death, carries up to life. The jury's special verdict said great bodily harm, not death. That changes the math, but the count is still on the verdict form. The reckless homicide count carries up to 60 years on its own. The chronic neglect count carries up to 60 more. Concurrent or consecutive will be the judge's call.

The defense has its appellate ground. The Konkol ruling. The exculpatory reports. The argument that the State charged the wrong parent. Whether any of that lives at the appellate level is its own fight.

What I will say, sitting on a Saturday in May with the verdict 24 hours old, is this. The State got a conviction. They did not get the conviction they wanted. The jury looked at a State witness the defense called an admitted perjurer, looked at two more witnesses the defense said were lying, looked at the testimony of three small children in two different homes, looked at the body cam of a deputy who walked away, and said yes, she is responsible for this child's life and his death. But they did not say she meant to do it. And they did not say her hands are what killed him.

Six-year-old Alexavier "AJ" Pedrin died in his father's house on February 11, 2023, in a household where the kids said both adults were violent and the system had been warned twice. He died on a couch where a deputy left him sleeping fifteen hours earlier. The jury looked at all of it and convicted the only person at the defense table.

That is the verdict. That is what it tells you. And we will be back for sentencing.