A North Dakota mother sent a chilling warning video to the father of her three children before she stabbed them in a frenzied attack, police say.
Kailey Erhart, 22, allegedly knifed her daughters Morgan, three, and Ava, five months, to death at her Mandan home on Thursday evening, according to an affidavit obtained by KVLY.
She also allegedly knifed her one-year-old son, Colton, but the little boy survived the attack after undergoing extensive surgery. Police say he sustained serious injuries.
Erhart carried out the ‘horrific’ attack after waving a gun at her estranged husband, Cameron, and chasing him and the children’s grandmother out of the house with a knife, the affidavit said.
When police responded at the home, they said they found Erhart covered in blood and holding a kitchen knife to her own throat.
Officers found the three children lying on the floor after following a trail of blood to a nearby bedroom, the filing said. They were unresponsive and had wounds on their necks, per the document.
Before the attack, Erhart texted a video to Cameron warning him to ‘say goodbye to your kids,’ the affidavit said.
The footage allegedly showed her carrying one child with a pistol on her hip.
Erhart was arrested at the scene and faces nine charges, including two counts of murder, one count of attempted murder and multiple counts of aggravated ᴀssault and terrorizing. She has not yet entered a plea.
Kailey Erhart is accused of knifing her three young children in her Mandan, North Dakota home on Thursday in what police have called a ‘horrific’ attack
Her daughters Morgan, three, and Ava, five months, were killed in the attack. Erhart’s one-year-old son survived, but sustained serious injuries
A judge has set Erhart’s cash bond at $3 million, according to Burleigh Morton Detention Center inmate records reviewed by the Daily Mail.
A formal no-contact order has also been put in place, barring the accused killer from contacting the surviving child or family members.
Her preliminary hearing and arraignment have been set for October 6.
Police said that Erhart and Cameron were in the midst of a separation at the time of the ᴅᴇᴀᴅly attack. He allegedly planned to file for divorce.
Erhart had an apparent history of mental illness, with the young mother admitting to having suffered from postpartum depression after Morgan’s birth three years ago.
‘This last month and a half have definitely been some of the hardest times I have been through,’ she wrote in a Facebook post in April 2023, the Daily Mail can reveal.
‘I love Morgan to pieces and I’m so glad she’s here, but my postpartum depression has definitely kicked my ʙuтт at times. Sometimes I feel so alone and stuck like nobody is there for me and I have nobody to talk to and sometimes I wish I would have waited to have Morgan.
‘It’s definitely been a wild ride considering I’ve felt so depressed and I thought Morgan would be better off with me gone, and other times like I don’t know where I’d be without her.’
Erhart, 22, faces nine charges, including two counts of murder, one count of attempted murder and multiple counts of aggravated ᴀssault and terrorizing. She is being held at the Burleigh Morton Detention Center on a $3 million cash bail
Erhart and her husband, Cameron, were in the midst of a separation at the time of the attack
She went on to say that she was ‘one lucky mama to have this little girl with me everyday’ and claimed that ‘adorable’ Morgan has ‘definitely helped me out in more ways then [sic] one.’
Erhart had also been insтιтutionalized over alleged mental health concerns about 12 to 18 months prior to Thursday’s attack, the affidavit said.
She had allegedly threatened to hurt herself and the children but was cleared to be around them after being discharged from the facility.
Erhart told police during questioning that she did not remember what happened during the ᴅᴇᴀᴅly attack last week.
She claimed to have put the children to bed and told officers she believed their throats had been slit before then, the affidavit said.
She did remember holding the knife in her hands when officers arrived at the home, according to the court document.
Mandan Police Chief Jason Ziegler, during a press conference, described the crime scene as ‘one of the most horrific’ that his officers are likely to ever encounter.
‘I want to acknowledge this is an extreme, tragic and heartbreaking incident for the children involved, their families, our community and first responders who arrived on scene,’ he said, KFYR reported. ‘Our thoughts are with everyone that were impacted.’
A GoFundMe campaign has been created to support Cameron and his one-year-old son
Police say Erhart and Cameron got into a physical altercation before her alleged killing spree at their home
Erhart appears in court before Judge Marina Spahr, who set her bail at $3 million. Her preliminary hearing and arraignment have been set for October 6
Police say Erhart and Cameron got into a physical altercation before her alleged killing spree.
She threatened him with the gun she had recently purchased, but he managed to disarm her during the struggle, which saw her bite and scratch him, the report said.
Cameron took the weapon apart and scattered the pieces, police said.
A GoFundMe campaign has been created to support Cameron and Colton during this difficult time.
‘He is a father trying to survive something no parent should ever have to face,’ the fundraiser said.
‘I lost two precious souls in a devastating tragedy after they were murdered by their mother, and the pain is more than I can put into words.
‘Every day, we are carrying unimaginable grief while also trying to stay strong for his surviving child, who is receiving ongoing medical care and facing challenges no child should ever have to endure.’
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
