The 12-year-old Oklahoma girl who stabbed her little brother to death while they were watching TV at home grew up surrounded by thugs, drug addicts and white supremacists.
DailyMail.com can reveal that the girl’s mother, father and stepfather have had their share of trouble with drugs and various run-ins with the law.
The girl’s father is a convicted felon currently in prison with ties to the white supremacist gang Universal Aryan Brotherhood, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Her stepfather was arrested in 2017 for torturing a cat to death and her mother April Mitchell battled drug addiction, firing several times a day, until she learned she was pregnant by the now-suspected brother-killer.
April Mitchell is the mother of the 12-year-old girl who stabbed her brother to death. For nearly a year in her late teens, Mitchell says she was a hardcore addict to “drugs of all kinds,” primarily opioids and methamphetamine, which she and the girl’s father shot into her arms several times a day.
The girl’s father, Dustin James Cunningham, 38, is a convicted felon currently in prison with ties to the white supremacist gang Universal Aryan Brotherhood, DailyMail.com can reveal
The girl’s stepfather, Levi Lyda, 39, was arrested in 2017 – when Zander was four and the girl was six – for torturing a cat to death. The cat belonged to his other daughter
DailyMail.com chose not to publish the girl’s name due to her age and the nature of her crime.
Tulsa County court and Oklahoma state child support records show that Dustin James Cunningham, 38, fathered the girl in 2010 with April Mitchell, 34, who said she moved in with him when she was 18 and shared his addiction to methamphetamine.
The girl’s father, Cunningham, is a seasoned criminal who is currently behind bars in a Tulsa County jail. Oklahoma state prison records include 16 different mugshots of Cunningham
According to prison records, Cunningham is a hardened criminal who is currently behind bars at a Tulsa County jail.
Police reports indicate he allegedly took deputies with the local sheriff’s office on a car chase in April when they tried to apprehend him for a “faulty taillight,” the arrest report said.
Shortly after midnight on April 18, the arrest report reads, Cunningham refused to stop his pickup truck when a deputy flashed his red-and-blue lights and accelerated.
The chase continued at “speeds well above the posted limit through a residential area,” including into someone’s yard, according to the report.
Cunningham crashed into a guardrail, jumped out of the truck and started running. He was apprehended a block away.
In the truck, officers found crystal meth in a pill bottle, a filled syringe and a transparent bag containing a “powder-like substance.”
He was charged with endangering others while evading police, possessing a controlled substance and driving without a license.
Cunningham told deputies he was trying to run because he is on probation.
Oklahoma state prison records include 16 different mugshots of Cunningham and show that he has spent at least six consecutive years in prison since January 2014 on charges ranging from drug trafficking, to possession of a firearm while committing a felony, to burglary.
The prison, says April Mitchell, is likely where Cunningham developed ties to the Universal Aryan Brotherhood, a racist gang known to run much of Oklahoma’s methamphetamine trade out of the prison system.
“He told me years ago he was a member,” Mitchell said in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com. “And he would get some of those people (UAB members) around the house.”
Just four days after the arrest of Cunningham’s 12-year-old daughter, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma announced the convictions of 69 UAB members, including its ringleader, Chance Alan Wilson, aka Wolfhead.
Mitchell says Cunningham was not involved in raising their daughter and owes tens of thousands in child support, a claim supported by family court documents in Tulsa. According to court documents, he was charged about $300 a month for the girl’s upkeep, but Mitchell says he never paid anything.
“I’ve had my daughter visit him in prison a few times. She was too small to know this was a prison,” Mitchell said. “And I let her go with him for a few hours here and there when he came back clean and sober, but I was so afraid I’d follow them.”
Stepfather Levi Lyda struggles with alcoholism and, when he could stay sober, was a father figure to Zander and his sister. Levi is pictured in an undated photo driving Zander in an undated photo before his death on January 5, 2023
Criminal records obtained by DailyMail.com show that Levi Lyda had previously been cited for public intoxication and a slew of traffic violations. He was also charged with stealing a motor vehicle just a week before the cat’s murder
Another man who has been in and out of the family’s life, April said, is her now ex-husband and Zander’s father, 39-year-old Levi Lyda.
Mitchell confirmed that Lyda struggled with alcoholism and, when able to stay sober, was a father figure to Zander and his sister.
According to state documents, Mitchell and Lyda got married in 2012.
“I found out he was an alcoholic eight months after we got married,” she said, “and we lived apart most of the marriage.”
Tulsa County records show their divorce was finalized on April 26.
Lyda, too, has had her share of run-ins with the law.
He is still on probation on charges of torturing a pet cat that belonged to other family members.
He was arrested for possession of a stolen vehicle and for his father’s strange attack in 2019.
According to a Tulsa Police Department officer’s arrest report, Lyda repeatedly punched his 63-year-old father in the parking lot of their apartment on April 15, 2019, disabling the elder’s hearing aids.
Van Lyda, the father, called 911 after finding his son “unresponsive” in the parking lot, the arrest report shows.
However, Levi Lyda awoke when the ambulance pulled up and attacked his father and an EMS technician.
He was convicted of domestic violence charges against a peace officer.
CCTV footage of the police body shows the 12-year-old girl running downstairs shouting, “I’m so sorry. I’m very sorry’
The handcuffed girl then leads police to the knife she supposedly used to stab her brother, which she had thrown from a window
Mitchell now argues that Cunningham and Lyda bear no responsibility for her daughter’s murderous rampage, an incident she calls “demonic.”
In fact, she says, until the tragic night, she managed to fulfill her life’s purpose of protecting the children from both the difficult men and the hardships she endured since her troubled teenage years.
Mitchell says she, too, was a hardcore addict for nearly a year in her late teens on “drugs of all kinds,” primarily opioids and methamphetamine, which she and the girl’s father shot into her arms several times a day.
“I stopped doing drugs as soon as I found out I was pregnant with her,” Mitchell said. “The gynecologist helped me with Tylenol and things like that, and I stopped. I’ve never gone back to those things since then.”