Surviving children remember leaving brother

Osborn, Mo. ? Levi Boothe was still alive the night of Aug. 27 when his father left him in a ditch beside the Kansas Turnpike, according to the boy’s mother.

Lisa Boothe said that’s what she was told by 11-year-old Levi’s surviving brother and sisters, who were along for the ride the night police say Raymond Boothe, 34, stabbed his son with a pair of needle-nose pliers and left the boy for dead on the turnpike east of Lawrence.

Timeline of events has some gapsRaymond Boothe’s family is still trying to piece together what happened between about 2 a.m. Aug. 27, when the 34-year-old apparently began his descent into madness, and 12:30 a.m. Aug. 28, when Lawrence Police found him walking near 27th Street and Lawrence Avenue with his three injured children.This much they know:Aug. 27¢ 2 a.m., Cameron, Mo., Police responded to a report that someone had started a fire outside the house the Boothes were renting. They found Raymond Boothe, who said he was moving out and had decided to burn some trash. The fire was extinguished without incident.¢ 3 a.m. Raymond Boothe was seen at an all-night convenience store downtown.¢ 5 a.m. Raymond Boothe reportedly exposed himself to a female clerk at a convenience store near Osborn, Mo.¢ Later that morning, Raymond Boothe, wearing only a pair of undershorts, was seen pumping gas in Creston, Iowa.¢ 9 a.m. Raymond Boothe arrived at a friend’s house in Creston, where he was loaned a pair of pants and a shirt. A few minutes later, he arrived at another friend’s house, shirtless.¢ About 1:30 p.m. Raymond Boothe, fully dressed, arrived at Irving Elementary School in Creston,where he picked up his 11-year-old son, Levi, and told the staff that he was taking him out for french fries. Raymond said it would take 20 minutes. Instead, he drove to his sister’s mobile home in Osborn.¢ About 6 p.m., alarmed by Raymond Boothe’s erratic behavior, his sister, Staci Perry, called Lisa Boothe at a rehabilitation program in Excelsior Springs, Mo.”He wanted to take the kids, and I said, no, they needed to eat first,” Perry said. “We got into an argument and he raised his hand at me, which is something he’d never done before I mean, my brother and me are really, really close so I knew something was wrong.”Perry said she called Lisa Boothe, hoping she could convince her husband to leave their four children with Perry.¢ 7 p.m., Lisa Boothe reported her children missing to Cameron Police.¢ 9:24 p.m., Leavenworth County dispatchers received a 911 call about a body in the westbound lane of the Kansas Turnpike about one mile east of the Douglas-Leavenworth county line. The body was later identified as that of Levi Boothe.Aug. 28¢ 12:20 a.m., Lawrence Police investigated an accident at 27th Street and Lawrence Avenue. Police said Raymond Boothe tried to kill himself and his three remaining children by crashing his car through a fence.¢ 1:40 a.m., Lawrence Police notified Lisa Boothe her children were in protective custody. Raymond Boothe later was jailed in Leavenworth County, where he was charged with the murder of his son.

Police have said that Levi either died from his father’s assault or from cars that later struck the boy abandoned on the highway.

“They (the children) haven’t said anything about the pliers,” said Lisa Boothe. “They said they saw daddy pop Levi in the face and say ‘Don’t talk to me like that, you don’t call your daddy names.’

“Then he put his arm around Levi’s neck like they do on wrestling what’s it called? a headlock. And then he got out of the car, and they didn’t see what happened after that.”

Levi’s three younger siblings, Nicole, 9, Mitchell, 7, and Makayla, 6, were in the back seat of the family’s Dodge sedan.

“They said Raymond took Levi over to the ditch and when he came back Levi wasn’t with him. He was still in the ditch, they could hear him crying,” Lisa Boothe said.

The three remaining children later survived a car crash in Lawrence that police called Raymond Boothe’s murder-suicide attempt. The surviving children are doing well, according to their mother. For now, they are staying with Raymond’s mother, Carol Boothe, in Osborn.

The children were returned to their family Friday morning after a brief stay in a Lawrence-area foster home.

Lisa Boothe said the children have yet to say much about the crash at 27th Street and Lawrence Avenue.

“They were asleep when it happened,” Lisa Boothe said. “They said a ‘big bump’ woke them up, and they flipped through the air and landed on their wheels. That’s about all they remember.”

The three children were wearing seat belts, she said, but Raymond Boothe was not.

“That’s kind of got us wondering whether he was really trying to kill the kids, like everybody says he was,” Lisa Boothe said. “If he was trying to kill them, why would he make them wear their seat belts?”

Lisa Boothe said the children miss their father, who was held in the Leavenworth County Jail until being transported to Larned State Hospital in central Kansas for mental evaluation.

“The other night, Mitchell was putting together this little Legos kit,” Lisa Boothe said. “And when he was finished, he said ‘Look, Mommy, won’t Daddy be proud of me when he gets home?”