Mom of 12-year-old 'brother killer' seen visiting her troubled daughter at juvenile detention center

The mother of the 12-year-old girl who stabbed her younger brother to death in a 'demonic' rage has opened up to DailyMail.com about the horrifying night that she lost both of her children. 

In an exclusive interview, April Mitchell, 34, told DailyMail.com that she's now forced to visit her daughter in the juvenile justice system's equivalent to a maximum-security prison while simultaneously mourning the loss of her nine-year-old son Zander. 

'What I remember is the screaming,' Mitchell says of that January night in their Oklahoma home. 'I was upstairs and they were downstairs and there was so much screaming.'

By the time she ran down to the living room, Mitchell said, Zander was lying on the couch.

'He didn't look hurt at first,' she said. 'There wasn't any blood. But he kept screaming ''she stabbed me, she stabbed me,'' I said, ''Who? Who stabbed you?'' I thought maybe someone came into the house. 

'I was looking for a bad guy, not one of my children.'

Her daughter, Mitchell said, ran outside and kept saying how sorry she was over and over.

'I pulled his shirt up and saw the puncture wounds,' teary Mitchell added, her voice trailing as she looked away.

Within hours, Zander was dead and Mitchell's daughter was facing murder charges. Mitchell described the girl's anger towards her brother that night as a 'demonic rage'.

April Mitchell's 12-year-old daughter stabbed her son Zander, nine, to death in January in a 'demonic' rage. She's pictured after visiting her daughter in the juvenile justice system's equivalent to a maximum-security prison

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Mitchell says that her daughter loved her brother and blames ADHD medication for the attack

'There are child murderers incarcerated with her in that place, but they are 15 or 16, and they are in gangs,' Mitchell said. 'My daughter is just 12, and she killed her 9-year-old brother while they watched TV on the couch. That's different from anyone there'

DailyMail.com has chosen not to publish the name of the girl because of her age and nature of her crime.

She is in detention in a Tulsa neighborhood where homeless drug addicts shoot up and smoke crack pipes in full view of parents who visit their incarcerated children.

Mitchell's children were watching the Nickelodeon show Henry Danger when her daughter stabbed her son

'There are child murderers incarcerated with her in that place, but they are 15 or 16, and they are in gangs,' Mitchell said as she was seen in DailyMail.com photos leaving the Tulsa County Juvenile Center last week. 

'My daughter is just 12, and she killed her 9-year-old brother while they watched TV on the couch. That's different from anyone there.'

'They love each other,' she said, 'I'm sure of that.'

Her daughter is accused of picking up a five-inch steak knife from a knife block in the single mom's kitchen and plunging it three times into her brother Zander's chest for no apparent reason on January 5.

Zander, who loved biking, playing soccer and basketball, died shortly after he was taken to the hospital.

The attack occurred after 11pm January 5 as the siblings sat alone on the living-room couch watching their favorite show, Nickelodeon's superhero comedy Henry Danger.

Juvenile justice records are confidential, but DailyMail.com has confirmed the girl is under the care of a team of counselors and a psychiatrist.

'Kids in that facility are well taken care of,' a Tulsa County court official, who asked to remain anonymous, told DailyMail.com. 

'The detention center looks like a school in some parts. They've got a nice gym and an outdoors recreation area. They're getting regular classes during the day. Most of the kids there are going through intensive therapy. 

'Of course, they get locked down at night. There are no bars on the doors of the rooms, but the doors are see-through.'

After a two-hour hearing Friday afternoon, a juvenile court judge decided to extend the girl's detention pending a final mental evaluation. She could be transferred to a non-detention mental care facility for children later this year.

Mitchell says she is relieved authorities agree she needs help more than prison.

'She has gained some weight in detention,' Mitchell said. 'She is going to school and she has good grades. She remembers some things about that night, and some things she doesn't remember. But she knows what she did and she knows there'll be consequences.

'Both of us try not to think about it. Sometimes, I pretend she and Zander are on a trip somewhere and that they'll come home and things will be like they were before.

'But we know things will never be the same.'

The girl is in detention and receiving intensive therapy  in the Tulsa County Family Center for Juvenile Justice

Juvenile justice records are confidential, but DailyMail.com has confirmed the girl is under the care of a team of counselors and a psychiatrist. After her visitation Friday, Mitchell went next door to a court hearing for her daughter which lasted two hours

'She has gained some weight in detention,' Mitchell said. 'She is going to school and she has good grades'

DailyMail.com previously revealed that the girl grew up surrounded by felons, drug addicts and white supremacists.

Her father is a convicted felon who is currently in jail and has ties to the white supremacist gang Universal Aryan Brotherhood.

Her stepfather was arrested in 2017 for torturing a cat to death and her mother battled drug addiction, shooting up several times a day, until she learned she was pregnant with the now suspected brother killer. 

But Mitchell is adamant that the family's background is not to blame.

'I blame her ADHD medicine,' she says. 'And I'm going to sue the drug company and the doctor who prescribed it to my daughter.'

Mitchell explained her daughter was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder shortly before she turned seven.

'Her ADHD wasn't really bad, but she couldn't focus at school,' Mitchell said.

She took low daily amounts of Intuniv for five years.

'She started having visions and hallucinations,' Mitchell said. 'She would tell me she was seeing ghosts.'

Her daughter, said Mitchell, reported seeing a little girl who sat next to her in her bedroom late at night.

'The little girl's face was cut up and she was bleeding, and she would tell my daughter she was going to die,' Mitchell said. 'There was another one she'd see in the mirror, a grown woman with a red coat without a face. She wasn't so scary but it was so real to her that she thought, at first, it was me.'

The girl's father Dustin James Cunningham, 38,  (left) is a convicted felon who is currently in jail and has ties to the white supremacist gang Universal Aryan Brotherhood. Her stepfather Levi Lyda, 39, was arrested in 2017 – when Zander was four and the girl was six – for torturing a cat to death

Happy family torn apart. April feeds Zander after his 2013 birth as the boy's father Levi Lyda looks on. The girl now in custody is seen as a toddler 

One morning, said Mitchell, her daughter ran out of her room because she thought thousands of ants were running over her body.

There were no ants.

In time, the family decided the girl would be home-schooled, and she quit taking Intuniv.

The visions stopped.

'She went back to regular school last August, and she asked to get back on the medication,' Mitchell said. 'At the time, I have not associated the problems from before with the drugs, so we went back to the doctor and he prescribed it her again.'

This time, her daughter became irritable and angry. She spent more time alone in her bedroom. She talked to school mates about stabbing her brother. And started harming herself.

One night in October 2022, the girl took the same knife she would eventually use to kill her brother, went to her bedroom and cut both her arms.

'I didn't know about it because she hid it from me with long sleeves,' Mitchell said. 'Someone at school figured it out and they called me. She said it made her feel better about herself.

'A few weeks later, she quit taking ADHD medicine all together, but I've read side effects can last for weeks and months.'

Zander was described as a sweet child who 'loved to ride his bike, play Fortnite, hang out with his best friend or just run errands with his mom' 

The apartment, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where just before midnight on January 5, the girl stabbed her brother to death 

A plant on the stoop of the family home in Tulsa contains a picture of Zander eating McDonald's with a toy train

In an interview June 2, New York emergency medicine expert Dr. Stuart Fischer told DailyMail.com there is evidence that ADHD medication can contribute to behavioral changes in children that could turn 'dangerous or pathological' in extreme cases.

Mitchell believes her daughter's case is one of those extreme cases.

There was so much violence that night that she couldn't believe a child was the attacker.

'They had just come back from Christmas shopping with their grandparents, and they bought presents for each other.

'Over the past few weeks, I've been looking through her stuff and I found letters she wrote to her brother about how she was excited to hang out with Zander. He took one of those letters and cut it into a heart shape and put it on his wall.

'They did yoga every night together. They had their own mats.'

With only her third kid left at home, a three-year-old boy named Cooper, Mitchell admits things were never easy for her and the three children – 'from three baby daddies,' she said, 'but all planned' – she's been raising practically alone on little money she earned as a house cleaner.

Yet, she calls her home a 'loving home.'

But in her family, she says, love may not have been enough.