District attorney: Police were looking into slain teen’s pregnancy

? Police had been investigating the pregnancy of a 14-year-old girl who was slain weeks before her due date, waiting for the baby’s birth so they could conduct a paternity test, Sedgwick County Dist. Atty. Nola Foulston says.

The body of Chelsea Brooks, who recently graduated from a Wichita middle school, was found last week in a shallow grave in neighboring Butler County. She had been strangled, and three men, including the one alleged to have gotten her pregnant, are charged in what is described as a contract killing.

Elgin “Ray-Ray” Robinson Jr., 20, and two other men are charged with capital murder and other offenses. Robinson is also charged with three counts of sexual intercourse with a child younger than 14 and one of violating a protective order that the girl’s mother obtained for her in February.

Charged with Robinson are Theodore Burnett, 49, and Everett Le Gentry, 17, a juvenile whom prosecutors want to try as an adult.

Chelsea was to have given birth around July 4. The unborn child was a girl whom the family had named Alexa Lynn Brooks.

Foulston told The Wichita Eagle on Thursday that the investigation into the pregnancy had been ongoing, so information had not yet been presented to her office for a determination of whether charges should be filed.

She said she could not comment further because of the homicide case now pending in court, and she would not say what the earlier investigation entailed.

Terri Brooks, Chelsea’s mother, filed documents in court in February accusing Robinson of impregnating her daughter.

She also cited police reports from July and January alleging illegal sex between a juvenile and a suspect, whose names were removed with white out from copies of the reports obtained by The Eagle.

Foulston said the policy in Sedgwick County is to wait until birth to conduct paternity tests because doing so before that would be invasive and could harm the fetus. Often, she said, “many of these girls are so romantically entwined” with the fathers of their unborn children that they won’t cooperate.

Neither police nor Foulston would comment on whether Chelsea had helped investigators with the case. But the protective order petition her mother filed against Robinson accused him of “psychologically manipulating” her daughter into keeping quiet about who made her pregnant.

State records show that in 2004, the latest year for which information is available, there were 17 pregnancies in Sedgwick County among girls 10 to 14, and 1,061 among girls or women ages 15 to 19.