This is very likely the saddest and most infuriating thing that you’ll read all day.
Source: Albany Times Union/Hearst Newspapers / Getty
The city of Chicago is regularly battered by bad-faith conservatives using the city’s crime issues as a totem of rejection for left-wing politics and policy. However, in this particular case, it’s fair to ask, what the f**k is going on in Chicago??? According to a WGNTV report, an 11-year-old boy named Jayden Perkins was brutally murdered while attempting to protect his pregnant mother from a man she dated over 15 years ago.
Crosetti Brand is a convicted felon with an extensive rap sheet that includes home invasion, possession of a stolen motor vehicle, and aggravated domestic battery of another woman. WGNTV reports that he was sentenced to 15 years in prison back in 2015 but was released on parole in October 2023 for the second time in five months. The unnamed woman tried desperately to seek an order of protection against him but a judge decided that it wasn’t that serious and denied the request.
According to a request for an Emergency Order of Protection filed on Feb. 21, the victim wrote that Brand “sent me several text messages saying he would kill me and my family. He would wait outside my house and shoot me. I have pics.”
On the morning of March 13, 2024, as the woman was leaving her apartment to take Jayden and his brother to school, Brand forced his way into the home and began stabbing her. Jayden was stabbed to death in the chest trying to protect his mother who was four months into her pregnancy. The mother and the baby are expected to survive.
Jayden Perkins was a sixth grader at Peirce School of International Studies in addition to attending a dance school on a full merit scholarship where he performed and was well-liked according to Block Club Chicago. He once played the role of a young Michael Jackson in a local play.
This was a bright young Black child who was well on his way to living out his dreams and all that was taken away because of a piece of s#!t ex-boyfriend, an apathetic judge, and a criminal justice system that allows habitual violators like Crosetti Brand to walk the streets. Jayden’s blood is on all of their hands.
