One hesitates to use the word “systemic” in the vicinity of something this ghastly, because the word has been drained of meaning by people who deploy it to avoid saying anything at all. But what happened in Mandan, North Dakota, on August 6 is a case study in institutional failure so textbook that one could assign it in a public administration seminar, if one could stomach it.
Kailey Erhart, 22, is charged with two counts of Class AA felony murder, attempted murder, and six additional felonies after allegedly cutting the throats of her three children with a kitchen knife in a single-wide mobile home on South Frontier Trail. Her daughters Morgan, 3, and Ava, 5 months, died. Her son Colton, nearly 2, survived surgery and remained hospitalized. Bond was set at $3 million cash. She has not entered a plea.
Here is where the literature on institutional failure becomes relevant, and where the exhaustion sets in.
According to the affidavit, the children’s father had previously reported to authorities that Erhart made threats to kill herself and the children. Erhart had been committed to mental health services within the past 12 to 18 months. She was prescribed medication. Child Protective Services was alerted to the threats. And then she was cleared to be with the children.
Cleared. The word does a great deal of work in that sentence. It implies assessment, deliberation, professional judgment. It implies that someone with credentials looked at a woman who had expressed homicidal ideation toward her own children and concluded that the risk had been managed down to an acceptable threshold. One would very much like to see the rubric.
The father told police that Erhart recently purchased a handgun. He showed them cellphone video of her carrying one of the children with the pistol on her hip, saying, “Say goodbye to your kids.” He managed to disassemble the firearm during a physical struggle. She then chased him and the children’s grandmother out of the house with a knife and locked the doors behind them.
Every safeguard was engaged. The father reported the threats. Mental health services intervened. CPS was notified. Medication was prescribed. And the system, operating exactly as designed, produced a clearance and moved on. The literature on this is not ambiguous. Filicide is not a random event. It is preceded by identifiable risk factors: expressed intent, recent acute crisis, access to means, separation from a partner. Every single one was present here. Every single one was documented. And the apparatus designed to synthesize those signals into protective action did what apparatuses do when they are underfunded, understaffed, and structurally oriented toward reunification at all costs: it processed the inputs and generated a clearance.
One is not suggesting conspiracy. One is suggesting that the distance between “she was cleared” and “she was holding a knife to her own throat in a bloodstained kitchen” is the distance between what our institutions promise and what they actually do. Mandan Police Chief Jason Ziegler said a scene like that is something nobody should ever have to see. He is correct. The question he did not ask, and was not asked, is how many people in the chain of decisions that returned those children to that home will be asked to see anything at all.
Erhart’s next court appearance is October 6. The surviving child’s GoFundMe has been organized by his grandmother. The system, having done its part, has moved on to the next case.