Was April Lyda's Daughter Doomed From The Start?
A 12 year-old girl stabs her nine year-old brother to death in Oklahoma. Horrible story. Can we learn anything?
The background on this story is that, in January 2023 in Tulsa, a 12 year-old girl (not named, but I am sure you can find her name on corners of the Internet) stabbed her nine year-old brother repeatedly. He was taken to the hospital and died at 2:30am. The girl is currently in a psychiatric facility in Oklahoma, but not in jail. Because she’s a minor, a lot of this stuff is sealed, including potential charges against her.
Here’s the widest view of the body-cam footage, including when they take her to a youth crisis center:
The mom’s name is April Lyda, although she is sometimes referred to as “April Mitchell.” The deceased boy’s name is Zander.
The mom, April, did appear on Chris Cuomo’s show after this initial body-cam stuff was released. She said her daughter had been on ADHD medication, went off it, went back on it, and then went off it again. She had self-harmed the very night before the murder. Apparently she had also told some school friends she was thinking of harming her brother:
You might think this is automatically a case about “what we put in children’s bodies” and “Big Pharma.” That might be the right angle, but it seems a lot deeper than that.
See, Ms. Lyda/Mitchell above has three kids by three different guys — not always an indictment of a woman, but an eyebrow-raiser at some level, sure. The problem is: these don’t appear to be good guys.
The 12 year-old, who did the stabbing, has a biological dad who’s big in the Oklahoma prison system and has ties to the Aryan Brotherhood.
Levi Lyda was the name of Zander’s biological dad. He’s apparently an alcoholic who once killed a kitten (belonging to another daughter of his) and also punched an EMT in the face in a different incident.
While the Aryan Brotherhood guy was apparently not that involved in the 12 year-old’s upbringing, he was a little bit. Levi was a good dad-ish.
April herself had problems with narcotics up to and into the pregnancy with the 12 year-old, although claims she stopped when she knew conclusively that she was pregnant.
April also has a three year-old now, although I am unsure who the dad there is. Probably some guy with the last name “Mitchell,” I would guess. In the body-cam above, there doesn’t appear to be an adult male in the home.
The easiest narratives here would be:
This girl is crazy.
Big Pharma screwed her.
Bad parenting / trailer trash people.
Those are low-hanging fruit narratives for sure. This case brings up some bigger societal questions for me, though.
First off, something I’ve thought about probably 1,200 times in the last three years of struggling through infertility stuff: does anyone “deserve” to be a parent?
The short answer is “No,” because no one “deserves” anything. What can be frustrating about infertility is that we hold babies up as this “blessing” or this “miracle” or whatever else, and while those stories are true and good for the people involved and the families to hear and believe, having a kid is basically raw biology. It’s a fast sperm delivered to a quality egg at the right time of a given month. That’s it. If you can do that, you “deserve” to have kids, even if you’re on meth and in the Aryan Brotherhood and whatever else. Because it’s a biological act, and it worked for you. Will you be good at raising those kids? Probably not, but that’s a different question than whether you “deserve” them.
The second question: do we let parents off the hook for too much?
Short answer here is “yes,” we do. Parenting is very hard (I would imagine) and has only gotten harder in the modern chicken fart of the economy. But when kids do bad stuff, or really horrible stuff, we tend to look for vague societal reasons to blame, i.e. “video games” or “music” or “these drugs they were on.” Even with all the studies on teenage depression since 2011, we blame “social media” instead of talking about parents and what parents could do. As an infertility person, I can tell you one insufferable aspect of multi-kid parents is that they always talk about how big a commitment it is (which is true), and then you look over and one of their kids is throwing rocks at the heads of their younger kid. Meanwhile, they’re on Mimosa №3. It’s draining, because the whole thing is a big commitment, and parents need to own that responsibility. I don’t know if it was “owned” in this Oklahoma case.
Also, in general, I think moms are expected to “own” parenting/raising and men can be — often are — a little flippant about the whole thing.
In the case of this 12 year-old girl, her dad was “flippant” in the sense that he was incarcerated and probably couldn’t see her very much, if at all. In middle-class scenarios, the flippancy takes a different form.
I don’t really think this girl ever had much of a chance. If she hadn’t stabbed her brother, I think another less-than-positive outcome could have resulted regardless. I do hope she gets the help she needs (a trite thing to say, but true) and I also don’t think she should go away for life. She should have a chance, down the road, to be a functioning adult member of Oklahoma (or wherever) society. I think of her a little bit like Morgan Geyser, even though Geyser’s victim survived.
What’s your take on this case and parenting roles/rules in general?