Kate Braser
by Mark McGowan
Kate Braser occasionally misses the newsroom of the Evansville Courier & Press, the southwestern Indiana daily where she worked for more than three years as the courts reporter.
The adrenaline! The pace! The stories! Only other journalists can understand that alternately exhilarating and miserable life, and only those who’ve gone on to the other side know how oddly wonderful and difficult it is to leave that all behind.
But Braser, who came to NIU last November as program coordinator for the Honors Program, will always carry a part of the Courier & Press newsroom in her heart.
Kalab Lay has seen to that.
“I’m still having dreams about Kalab and the case. It’s always there,” says Braser, one of two reporters who authored an award-winning newspaper series on the toddler’s short life. “When the series started running, it was emotional for me. I don’t know why. It wasn’t like closure at all.”
Kalab died April 1, 2008, a day after paramedics were summoned to the Evansville trailer park home of his parents and found the child unresponsive on the floor.
Only 3, and with most of his 47 months spent in the foster care system and hospitals, Kalab had lived a mere three months with his parents before they allegedly beat him to death over a period of days.
His autopsy revealed nine blunt-force traumas to his head that caused enough bruising, swelling and bleeding in his brain to create pressure and damage the brain stem. He had pneumonia, was thin and losing hair. He was healing from a retinal hemorrhage.
As police, prosecutors and journalists dug into the sad details of Kalab’s brief and tragic existence, they uncovered a stranger-than-fiction story of drugs, prison, abuse and neglect as well as a complicated and failed web of interstate child-protection bureaucracy.
His mother, Amanda Brooks, admitted to using methamphetamine and smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day for the first half of her pregnancy with Kalab and his twin sister, Kayla. Brooks, who tested positive for amphetamines in the days after her son’s murder, pleaded guilty last December to neglect of a dependent resulting in death.
His father, Terry Lay, already had been convicted of the neglect of his older children from another mother and had relinquished his parental rights to them. Lay awaits trial on charges of murder and neglect of a dependent resulting in death.
Both parents are high school dropouts with long criminal records and prison stays.
In January of 2008, when they obtained temporary custody of Kalab and Kayla, both had recently left separate Illinois prisons after serving terms related to the manufacture of methamphetamines. Those charges came in 2004, when the twins were two months old and living in the southeastern Illinois apartment that served as the drug lab.
Kalab and Kayla received much-needed medical care and then were deposited into foster care, but an Illinois judge committed to a goal of family reunification eventually sent them “home” to an Indiana trailer park.
‘Failing Kalab’
Braser began her journey with Kalab on the day he died.
“On the first day, it was a combined effort. Libby Keeling and I covered it non-stop after that,” says Braser, a 2003 graduate of the University of Iowa who majored in journalism and communication studies. “Almost right away, we knew it would evolve into a series. We knew if we didn’t write the series that we were just two more adults who failed Kalab.”
The series, called “Failing Kalab,” ran for five Sundays beginning May 17. Its first chapter: “Doomed from the start?”
Each installment carefully traces the heartbreaking story, reaching back to before Lay and Brooks met at a party and continuing through that fateful encounter and the turbulent relationship that eventually spawned and then killed Kalab.
Key to their reporting was a bill a 2004 authored by Indiana state lawmaker Dennis Avery – ironically, the Democrat represents Evansville – that makes public all files and investigations related to the deaths of children under state protective custody.
After filing a Freedom of Information Act request, Braser and Keeling drove to a local copy shop and received more than 3,000 pages that included police reports, court records, medical records and the incredibly personal and sometimes graphic notes and reports of the child welfare caseworkers appointed to protect Kalab and Kayla.
They jammed the backseat of Braser’s Toyota Yaris with the documents, which soon were stacked throughout her apartment. They drew family trees to keep track of all the story’s characters. They contacted every name mentioned in those 3,000 pages to request interviews. Some talked. Many declined.
Silence frustrated the reporters, but they already had so much information at their disposal: accounts of sobbing, both from Kalab and Kayla and from their foster parents; of the lack of tears at the conclusions of their visits with Brooks and Lay; of a caseworker singing to comfort the children as she drove them to the trailer park Jan. 3, 2008.
“There were so many details,” Braser says. “The challenge was what not to include.”
Unfortunately, sifting through those papers is pretty much her only memory of the “sad” summer of 2008.
“Me, Libby, two editors, the photographers – everyone was emotional,” she says. “It was worse than we thought it was going to be, and we had prepared ourselves for how bad it would be.”
Coming home
In November, six months after the death of Kalab Lay, Braser returned to her hometown of Sycamore. Her job in Honors provides the opportunity to diversify her professional experiences, she says.
Braser interacts closely with the students in the program (and in the Honors House residential option) as she plans events, trips and seminars and maintains connections with faculty.
She also organized the “Huskie Acts of Kindness” exhibition as part of the first anniversary remembrance of NIU’s Feb. 14 tragedy. Thousands of postcards were submitted by people of all ages who were moved to help and love family, friends and strangers in response to Feb. 14.
“Coming to NIU was the greatest change ever,” she says. “Being here has upped my expectations for humanity.”
Meanwhile, she admits, the newspaper industry is not a healthy one.
(However, she praises her Courier & Press editors for the freedom they provided her and Keeling to pursue the Kalab Lay series during a time when most newspapers are cutting staff.)
As a child, Braser dreamed of growing up to become a reporter but changed her mind when her cousin was killed and “treated badly” by the local press. Later realizing “that was probably why I should be” a reporter, she put aside new goals of event planning and public relations and joined the staff of the collegiate Daily Iowan.
Pioneer Press, a suburban Chicago chain of newspapers, was her first stop after graduation. In 2005, she made the move that would alter her life: to the “River City,” the busy city of 121,000 nestled on the bend of the Ohio River, the city where Kalab Lay would die.
Coming home three years later could not undo that transformation, partly because she brought Kalab with her. The series was far from being completed, and Braser was determined to finish the work with Keeling.
Nights and weekends were devoted to interviews and writing. The reporters, now separated by 275 miles, stayed in a near-constant contact through cell phones and e-mail, communicating to each other more than to their friends and family.
Their only goal: honoring Kalab, and possibly saving others like him, by shedding light on a broken system.
“It was one of the worst cases I have ever covered. It should give people nightmares,” Braser says. “As a journalist, you kind of appreciate the opportunity to cover a story like this one, to cover something that matters so much to so many people. It was hard but it was a privilege.”
‘Anything that will keep attention’
As the Braser-Keeling coverage ran in the pages of the Courier & Press, the community latched onto Kalab’s memory. They also learned of Kayla’s luck to remain alive: She, too, had been “savagely beaten” and “battered,” physicians and police confirming that her face and body were covered in bruises and abrasions.
Some readers who visited the comments section on the newspaper’s Web site formed a group called “Break Your Silence” to boost awareness that might prevent child abuse.
The guilty plea entered by Kalab’s mother includes a sentencing recommendation of 20 years for the battery count and 35 years for the neglect, which she will serve concurrently in an Indiana prison. She also must testify against Kalab’s father.
Saline County (Ill.) Circuit Court Judge Todd Lambert, who made the ruling that sent Kalab and Kayla to the Indiana trailer park, was voted out of office last November. Two months later, however, the court reappointed Lambert as an associate judge. He has disqualified himself from further association with the case.
Kayla eventually returned to the foster home from which Lambert removed her. Kalab’s heart, liver and kidneys were donated to a trio of recipients in Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin.
The newspaper series won a first-place award for enterprise reporting in the Best of Scripps contest. The judges called it “powerful and important work.”
“ ‘Failing Kalab’ was more than a labor of love to these two reporters, so much so that Braser continued working on it after she had left the paper for a university position. It was labor of outrage, and rightfully so,” the judges’ comments stated. “Three-year-old Kalab Gene Lay didn’t just fall through cracks in the system – he fell through chasms.”
For Braser, the community outcry and political response is evidence that “we lived up to our promise” to Kalab.
“It’s nice that all our work was appreciated and recognized by our peers. Anything that will keep attention on the case isn’t a bad thing,” Braser says. “But I’d be a lot happier if laws were changed.”