BRAINERD — With social media comment sections abuzz in the wake of news breaking of the arrest of a Crosslake woman for child torture, Chelsey Perkins began to poke around.
Now the news director of KAXE, Perkins was previously the community editor at the Brainerd Dispatch newspaper, where she covered Crow Wing County government until February. On Between You & Me, Perkins discussed with Heidi Holtan, KAXE director of content and public affairs, what it was like to report on the three-part investigative series “The Children Who Came Before,” published shortly after her departure.
After Perkins posted an initial write-up on Jorden Nicole Borders’ case following her arraignment in district court, new leads emerged in reaction to the news. While tag-teaming court coverage with colleague Tim Speier, Perkins pursued some of these new leads. Chief among them was the notion Borders had older children, and this wasn’t her first experience with child protection.
“The deeper I looked into it, the more information I was finding that was showing that this was factual information,” Perkins told Holtan. “And I ended up on this complete rabbit hole of all of this, where I started looking at court records and court records led to other court records.”
Perkins explained how her work on the story prompted the Brainerd Police Department to reopen a decade-old child death investigation and recapped the information she uncovered through family and child protection court records during her months-long reporting efforts.
After a Crow Wing County judge granted Perkins access to a juvenile protection case related to a one-time friend of Borders’ — previously sealed as a confidential record — she learned more about the death investigation and Borders’ involvement in the case.
“They actually handed me a physical court file in the courthouse with the original paperwork, and I was able to go through that,” Perkins said. “And I got way more of the story from that record than I could have ever expected. And lo and behold, there was her name all over it, with a judge ordering her to not have contact with yet another child.
“So at that point my research had revealed … she had two children of her own, her husband also had a child and then her friend's child — all four of those children, she either lost custody or was ordered to have no contact with them. And this was nearly a decade before this most recent case.”
Perkins discussed her experiences in introduction to a recentKAXE Morning Showconversation about Sunshine Week, a week dedicated to public records and why they’re important to the watchdog role of journalists and citizens alike.
Listen to the full Between You & Me podcast episode here and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or in the NPR One app.
