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.

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?”