Posted at 1:42 PM, May 6, 2026
LA CROSSE, Wis. (Court TV) — Children offered troubling details as they testified to abuse they said their mother inflicted on a 6-year-old boy who was found dead.
Josie Dikeman appears in court as her stepson testifies. (Court TV)
Josie Dikeman, 34, is charged with first-degree intentional homicide, chronic neglect of a child resulting in death and repeated physical abuse of a child causing death and has pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors say her abuse directly led to the death of 6-year-old Alexavier Pedrin, who investigators said died of blunt force trauma in February 2023. At the time of his death, Alexavier had been recovering from a broken leg; an autopsy found he had multiple bruises to his face, scalp and neck along with internal injuries that included a lacerated liver and brain swelling. Testimony also revealed that Xanax was found in Alexavier’s bloodstream after his death.
Dikeman told police that she found Alexavier after she woke up in the morning and suggested that he may have gotten into medications while she was asleep.
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Testimony from two children who lived in the house with Alexavier offered the jury new insight into what home life was like for the victim. Dikeman’s 11-year-old biological son testified that he saw his mother hit and kick Alexavier on multiple occasions. “Sometimes she chokes him and sometimes she kicks him a lot,” the boy previously said in a taped forensic interview played before his testimony. Dikeman’s son said that none of the other children in the house were hit except for the victim. He also said that Alexavier would be fed noodles with hot sauce when his father wasn’t home. When the other children got pizza, Alexavier was only offered the crusts; he allegedly had to eat them from the floor, the child testified.
The victim’s brother, now in third grade, testified that he saw Dikeman push Alexavier down the stairs. “Josie would push him down the basement stairs into the basement when he had a broken leg, and she would choke Alex and she would hit and kick him,” the sibling testified on Wednesday.
Alexavier had a broken leg at the time of his death; the 11-year-old testified that on the day the child broke his leg, weeks before his death, he saw Dikeman bending back Alexavier’s leg while the child cried. “She said, ‘If you don’t stop crying, I’ll do it harder.’”
While the 11-year-old was at his grandmother’s home on the morning when Alexavier’s body was found, the victim’s brother said he remembered seeing Alexavier lifeless. “He was laying on the bed with his eyes closed not moving,” he said. The sibling testified that Dikeman pulled him away and was crying.
Dikeman’s defense has pointed to the sibling and Alexavier’s father, Derek Pedrin, as the more likely cause of Alexavier’s death, saying that he was abusive. When asked, both children testified that they had never seen Pedrin hit any of the kids in the house.
