The Minnesota Presumption Killed Them Both of Them
Eli Hart was six. He was killed by his mother on May 20, 2022, shot as many as nine times in his booster seat in the back of her car, in Mound, Minnesota, ten days after Dakota County District Judge Tim Wermager terminated court jurisdiction and returned him to her sole custody — over the documented warnings of the court-appointed guardian who told the file she was “very concerned about Ms. Thaler’s mental health.”
She had failed her drug tests.
She had been on a mental-health hold for paranoid delusions and voices telling her to kill herself. She got him anyway. The killing is reported in detail at and the systemic failure at Dakota County paid Eli’s father, Tory Hart, $2.25 million to settle the wrongful-death suit, *Hart v. County of Dakota*, 0:22-cv-02035 (D. Minn.),
The case => https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/minnesota/mndce/0:2022cv02035/202562/169/.
Autumn Hallow was eight. She died of asphyxiation and starvation on August 13, 2020, in her father’s apartment in Elk River. Her father and her stepmother took turns beating her in the bathroom, where she had been confined for at least three days, with food and water withheld.
Both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and got 40 years each, Her biological mother, Kelsey Kruse, had a court-ordered 50/50 parenting-time arrangement. She was locked out from January 2020 onward, with COVID-19 cited as the pretext.
A lot of rights were suspended in Minnesota during Covid. I’ve never heard of a case of non custodial parental rights being enforced in Minnesota.
Elk River police had been called to the apartment 31 times. Kelsey called Sherburne County Child Protection. The intake worker reportedly told her that “if they won’t answer the door for police then they’re not going to answer the door for them.”
Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota documented the systemic failure.
Look at the two cases for a moment as if they sit on opposite sides of a ledger.
In Eli’s case, the system presumed the mother safe and discounted the father’s warnings.
In Autumn’s case, the system presumed the stepmother safe — and, by structural extension, the father — and discounted the biological mother’s warnings.
The cases look like mirror images. They are not. They are the same presumption applied to whichever female-coded adult happened to be standing closest to the child at the moment the custody decision was made.
The presumption has a name. It is the Power and Control Wheel, the central conceptual tool of the Duluth Model, which places a male perpetrator at the center as a structural matter and a female victim at the periphery.
The Wheel is the doctrinal substrate of the SAFeR Framework, that the Battered Women’s Justice Project trains Minnesota family-court judges, mediators, custody evaluators, and guardians ad litem to apply under the Family Court Enhancement Project.
The training is funded by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women.
The substrate is sex-coded at the doctrinal level.
The substrate’s own co-founder, Ellen Pence, admitted in writing in 1999 that the power-and-control premise “did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with,“.
The federal money did not stop. The state training did not stop. The presumption did not stop. The killings did not stop.
Eli’s father was the warning voice. Autumn’s mother was the warning voice. The system was federally trained to discount whichever parent was outside the sex-coded presumption at the time.
Both children were killed by the parental figure the federally trained system had decided was the safer choice. Coincidentally, it was also the choice most likely to keep federal money inside the county.
This is what the Title IX statute exists to prevent. 20 U.S.C. §1681(a) prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex” in any “education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance,” .
The SAFeR training is a federally assisted education program.
The Power and Control Wheel embedded in it is a facial sex-classification. The classification produces predictable outcomes when the warning voice is on the wrong side of the sex line. The Center for Judicial Excellence has counted more than 944 such outcomes nationally since 2008.
Eli is in a six-year-old’s grave because Dakota County applied the presumption. Autumn is in an eight-year-old’s grave because Sherburne County applied the presumption.
The presumption was paid for by the federal taxpayer through the same office that has spent twenty-seven years on notice that the doctrine has been disclaimed by its author.
You cannot fund a sex-coded training program with federal education-assistance dollars and call the resulting deaths an accident.
The deaths are the program’s outputs. The bills are paid. The model continues.
The Department of Justice has the file in front of it. The Title IX complaint is overdue.
The children are still in the placements the curriculum produces.
