Micah & Brittney: Friday Night and Saturday Morning is the last of three excerpts from influential writer Chris Kraus’s in-progress book, The Four Spent the Day Together, which are being published exclusively by the Pioneer Works Broadcast. Inspired by a series of crimes in the northern Midwest, the book dives deep into the small-town dramas of Hibbing, Minnesota—in the state’s Iron Range—leading up to a homicide on a snowmobile trail. Read the first installment here and the second here.

HARDING – Brittney Moran shuffled into the St. Louis County Courtroom wearing black jeans and a t-shirt displaying a gray skull. Her wrists and ankles were cuffed as she sat down beside her newly appointed defense attorney, Anna Saxberg, before 6th District Judge Robert M. Marks. Moran, 17, of Harding, was here to make her initial appearance after being charged with first degree murder in connection with the slaying last month of 33-year old Brandon Halbach of North Star.

Moran initially faced charges of second-degree murder in juvenile court, but last Tuesday a grand jury indicted Moran on first-degree murder and turned her case into an adult matter.

The grand jury also indicted her co-defendant, Micah King, on a first-degree murder charge. King, 18, of Harding, walked into court with dark, slicked-back hair and blue jail-issued clothing and saddled up next to his defense attorney…

Micah was fourteen years old when he had his first encounter with the local police. His mom, Crystal King, called 911 because she was frightened. Her husband Ben was at work and Micah was completely out of control, screaming and kicking and threatening to jump out the upstairs bedroom window he’d just smashed with a chair. He was refusing to take his new medication, the Risperidal tablets the PA at the hospital had just prescribed for him. Micah hated this new drug. It was impossible to think and it made him so fat he’d started growing tits.

Of course this wasn’t the first time the police had been called. Crystal had been calling for help since Micah was a toddler—in Guthrie, Oklahoma;in Minnesota where they’d lived in four or five cities and towns, and then in Marville, South Carolina—but this was the first time she’d called the police since they’d all moved up to Harding the year before.

In Oklahoma, the doctors and therapists thought Micah’s rages were just extreme childhood tantrums. Ignore it, they said. Just let him do his thing, ride it out until he gets tired. His biological father, Crystal’s first husband Austen, didn’t agree. He believed if their son did something wrong, he should be disciplined. How else would he learn? Instead of letting Micah just act out, Austen, an ex-wrestling coach, would try and restrain him, taking Micah in his arms while the boy flailed in every direction, until Micah, already big for his age, finally collapsed in exhaustion. Austen and Crystal did their best, but there were limits as to how much they could do, because their second child Anthony, eleven months Micah’s junior, had so many special needs. The doctors had never seen anything like it before, arising from cerebral palsy, epilepsy, neuropathy, and a few other things.

When Dajon was three the tantrums continued, but a new side of his rage emerged. And this new side was even scarier because it was cooler, almost rational. Threatening to kill their neighbor’s thirteen-year old daughter, he told them, without a trace of anger, I’m going to kill her and she’s going to be dead for a long time.

He said this with detached curiosity, as if he was remembering a fairy tale. And just a few months later, when his little sister Sierra was a newborn, Micah picked another boy up by his throat and started bashing his head into a wall. With her infant in a baby sling and Anthony in his wheelchair, Crystal took Micah to the doctor. Questioned about his violent impulses, Micah shocked them all by calmly stating I have scissors that can stab you guys while you’re sleeping…I’m gonna stab you all tonight while you’re sleeping.

That seemed so unlike him. Unless he was gripped by an uncontrollable spasm of rage, Micah was gentle, protective of others, and sweet. Sometimes it seemed like he was trying on words as if they were clothes. Still, that remark put him in Tulsa Pediatric Psychiatric for two weeks.

Micah wasn’t diagnosed with high-functioning autism until they moved to Minneapolis. He was treated briefly by psychologists and speech therapists until Crystal missed one too many of their multiple appointments and the treatment team decided there was nothing further they could do for him. Since then, his autism was managed or not managed by a roundelay of psycho-pharmaceuticals.

Micah’s second encounter with the Iron Range police occurred five months later. By then, they’d moved to Colberg, an even smaller, poorer town three miles east of Harding. Crystal and Ben had found a one-and-a-half story wood-frame “rent to own” house with a big yard on the northwest side of town. For the first time in their married life, they were homeowners. “They,” at this point, included Micah’s mom, his step-dad Ben, his siblings, and his half-siblings Sierra, Dylan, Eric, Jackeline and Cheyenne, and Quinton, a sort-of adopted older brother three years Dajon’s senior, who’d joined the family during a brief sojourn in South Carolina. His little brother Anthony passed away when Micah was eleven, but Cheyenne, born four years later, had some of Anthony’s same special needs.

On a Saturday afternoon in February 2017, Micah was walking alone outside the Colberg Hockey and Curling Club, a few blocks away from his house. He liked to walk. Officers passing by in a patrol car observed “a tall youth with a shuffling gait” (it was the Risperidal) rummaging through the cigarette canisters alongside the gates. Assuming Micah was drunk, the cops asked what he was doing. Very precisely, he explained he was going through withdrawal from nicotine. Since he wasn’t old enough to buy cigarettes for himself he was looking for thrown-away butts. They told him to move along, and he did.

Between that afternoon and the night two years later when he kidnapped and killed Brandon Halbach, there were at least a dozen more police encounters.

Some were for typical teenage infractions—truancy and drinking, unlicensed driving and fights. Others resulted from Crystal’s panicked calls to 911, where he ended up on the hospital psych ward on 72-hour holds.

All in all, the move from Harding to Colberg was good for Micah. He was smart in science and math but he knew from his first day in eighth grade at Harding High he was going to be one of the hood-rats, and never a preppy, a nerd, or a jock. Of course there’d been cliques at his old school in suburban Pine City, but up here in the country it was so much more pronounced. No matter if they were smart, dumb, grotesque, or hot, all the low-income kids in Harding banded together because the college-bound middle-class kids instinctively shut them out. Since all of Colberg’s middle-class kids bussed over to Harding, the Colberg high school was smaller, with a whole lot less pressure. Nobody cared. The kids in Colberg looked out for each other. To people in Harding, Colberg was trash.

Dajon’s mom and his step-dad Ben King broke up on Christmas Eve when he was seventeen years old. He stood at the window upstairs and watched Benloading things into his truck. He’d known Ben since he was eight. Three days later he walked into the house to find his mom crouched on the floor, her head bobbing fast up and down between his adopted brother Quinton’s bare legs. Enraged, he smashed the TV, the living room windows, and the Christmas tree with a chair. After that, he stopped going to school. When CPS threatened to take him away, Shannon sent him to North Dakota to stay with his grandmother Raylene until things blew over, so he’d be safe.

By the end of the school year Micah moved back home—which was now a three-bedroom apartment in the South Colberg HRA projects. They’d moved after Crystal stopped paying the house. Nine of them crammed in the apartment and there were fights all the time. His mom bought a gun. For years, she’d worked part-time on and off as a masseuse but now she started doing motel outcalls, determined to save up enough to get them all back into a house. Quinton and Crystal were talking about getting married, and they slept in the same bed every night.

There was nothing for Micah to do but accept that twenty-one-year-old Brett had become sort of a cross between step-dad and friend. In the end it wasn’t so bad. Besides, Micah was no longer a kid, he’d be eighteen in the fall. He got his PCA—Personal Care Attendant—credential online so he could help care for his little sister Cheyenne, it was $140 a week. The rest of his money he made selling drugs. The rednecks who fixed up old cars in the HRA parking lot called him a retard. Each time it happened, his mom flew into a rage but Micah just ignored them. Instead, he fell in with some older Black guys from the Cities who claimed to have ties to the Gangster Disciples. One of them, Jerrom Winter, told Micah if he could get in with the Gangster Disciples they’d take care of his family for life. But how could he do this? He had to kill someone first, Jerrom said. And he had to have proof.

Brittney texted Micah from her room on Friday afternoon January 4. Hey what you doin

Micah and Brittney had been together for almost six weeks. Brittney was Misty’s best friend, and now Misty was living in Harding with Evan, who’d been a friend of Micah’s from the Pine City days. When Misty’s ex-boyfriend Fernando got sentenced to six months in jail after the big Thanksgiving Day fight, Fernando’s brother Diego fled back to Thief River Falls and she was left in the three-bedroom apartment alone.

Misty and Evan got together on Facebook via Crystal, who was their mutual friend. Evan had to get out of Pine City and Misty needed a roommate to help pay the rent, so Crystal, Quinton and Misty drove down to Pine City to pick Evan up. As they drove through the night, as soon as Evan took Misty’s hand in the backseat of the car and she did not take it back an electrical charge ran straight to his heart, and he knew he wasn’t alone anymore. It was a done deal.

Evan was almost part of Micah’s family. Jamie, Evan’s adoptive brother, was one of Crystal’s best friends. In Pine City they all went to the same church. Evan wasn’t much older than Micah but he was like a big brother, alert to his moods, making a joke when things got too intense. It was weird how the old Pine City tribe had re-gathered up here in Harding, two hours north. This was because Evan was now living with Misty in Harding, at the duplex on East 11^th Street, in the apartment next door to the one Landlord Bob had moved them all into that fall until December 15, when he moved them one street away into a house.

Everything good sorry phone died Micah texted back.

The duplex was how Micah met Brittney. Returning to Harding in time for Thanksgiving after being in treatment, she was supposed to be living at home, a few houses away, but she spent most of her time over at Misty’s where she pretty much had her own room.

Micah had seen Brittney around, but at Misty’s he saw her up close. It was weird how most of the kids felt sorry for her, the little lost girl, when she was the one who should feel sorry for them. Because Brittney was tough, creative, and smart. She was seventeen, but she’d been lying about her age for so long you could almost believe she was thirty years old. Brittney drew, she read books, and she knew how to make all kinds of things out of blown glass. She was beautiful, too, with black biker boots, a wolf tattoo on her chest, and razor-cut hair. Brittney was famous in town for dating guys twice her age. Micah could hardly believe she was interested in him. Still, there was a side of her that was soft.

I figured, she texted back.

Dylan, Brittney’s 27-year-old former boyfriend, was in jail for giving her meth. But it was all so fucked up, Brittney said. People thought she was the victim because of her age, but except for the drugs she’d been trying to take care of him. Dylan had done some dumb stuff down in the Cities with checks, but instead of going to court he’d moved up to the Range to make a fresh start. And anyway she’d been shooting up meth since she was fifteen, which was not Dylan’s fault. Although since finishing treatment she’d stuck to just Addys and weed.

I’m having the worst day, Micah texted Brittney from his basement room of the new house. The 20 bucks Jeremy gave him for weed just flew out of his pocket, now he’d have to borrow two g’s from his mom. He was tired of being so broke all the time in this freezing unheated basement, not even having a car.

I’m sorry, love. Brittney was always so sweet.

I just really want to shoot someone, he texted back.

That can’t be your go-to every time you’re upset

But it helps the anger go away

Yeah so does sex

I’m having Brittney come over tonight, Dajon texted upstairs to his mom.

Everyone can criticize her but I love her

and she makes me happy

and I need happy right now I’m really depressed

Before getting dressed to sneak out to Dajon’s, Brittney opened the “Cherry” page on her phone. A 50-year old guy up in Ely wanted a video made: strip and then pussy play. He PayPal’d her forty-five bucks, so she slid down her jeans and held the phone to her crotch. The file was so heavy she had to splice it in two to get it to send.

You didn’t cum, Ely complained.

I don’t really ever cum from masturbation, she consoled.

Damn that sucks.

Yeah. XX

Brittney slipped out of the house and came back an hour later. Her parents never knew she was gone. They’d been partying out in the garage with some friends.

Late Saturday morning she hooked up with some 33-year old guy from North Star on Plenty of Fish who said he could give her some Addys.Brandon—that was his name—offered to bring them over to Harding for her. He had his own car. Brittney gave him Misty’s address and went over to wait.

Misty was out at some kid’s party over in Colberg but Evan was home on the couch with a big glass of Lean. As usual, he was playing Skrillex so loud she could hear every beat through his headphones. Brittney went into the room they let her use to hang out and do business—a double mattress, an old boom box, some dresser drawers—and waited for Brandon. He arrived around 1.

Three hours later, Brittney texted Micah.

I have someone your gonna want to handle

Who

Goes by the name Halbach

Don’t know him

She’d already taken a photo of Brandon and fumbled around on her phone.

That’s him

He has a very punchable face, Micah texted back.

I’m at Misty’s, I’m too upset to leave here, I’m freaking out, can you come?

What’s wrong

I want it to be in person

Omw, Micah replied.

She texted back quickly, Make sure you bring your piece ♦