A Holland mother who called 911 while she tried to kill her son, has been sentenced to 60 to 90 years in prison.
Katie Lee, 39, had pleaded guilty in October 2025 to second-degree murder, torture, and resisting and obstructing police in the death of 17-year-old Austin Dean Pikaart.
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| Austin Dean Pikaart |
The case began in the early morning of February 21, 2025, when Lee dialed 911 from the Bay Pointe Apartment Complex on East 16th Street in Holland, Michigan.
“We need an officer here immediately,” Lee told the dispatcher, and when asked what was happening, she replied, “My son won’t stop breathing.”
According to police reports, at first the dispatcher misunderstood what she was saying, and wondered if the teen was breathing too fast.
But Lee quickly corrected that impression, explaining that she had been trying for hours to stop his breathing and that things had “got way out of hand.”
She told the dispatcher that her son allegedly did not want to turn 18 the next day and that she had promised to help him die.
Around 1 p.m. earlier that afternoon, she and her son had each swallowed a mix of medications—Tylenol PM, hydroxyzine, and others—in what Lee said was a joint suicide attempt by she and her son, as per Aetv.
However, they didn't die immediately as planned, but Austin reportedly passed around 6 p.m., however, his breathing never stopped.
While he was still unconscious, Lee took a large kitchen knife and cut his throat three times and also sliced his arm near the arteries so he could die, because according to her, that was their agreement.
“I couldn’t get him to stop breathing like he made me promise to do,” Lee said to the dispatcher, adding that her son had made her vow not to take him to a hospital.
“I didn’t do this out of hatred, it was out of love,” Lee said during the call.
When Holland police officers arrived at the apartment just after 4:15 a.m., they found Lee standing in the doorway holding a kitchen knife up by her shoulder, the blade and her clothing stained with blood.
Officers ordered her to drop the weapon, but she refused, so one officer fired a taser, yet it had no effect.
Lee then threw the knife into the hallway, then lunged for it again, but officers deployed tasers a second time and took her into custody.
Court documents later noted that Lee told the officers they were “supposed to” kill her so she could be with her son.
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| Katie Lee |
Inside the apartment, officers discovered Austin lying in bed with a pool of blood around his head.
He was pronounced dead at the scene, and an autopsy confirmed he died from a large cut to his neck, so his death was ruled a homicide.
The next day would have been his 18th birthday, but sadly, he didn't live to celebrate that milestone.
Lee was taken to a hospital for a possible overdose evaluation before she was later charged with open murder as well as resisting and obstructing an officer.
At her first court appearance, held over Zoom, she wept throughout the ten-minute proceeding while family members called out from the gallery, “We love you, Katie.”
In October 2025, just days before her trial was scheduled to begin, Lee was found competent to stand trial and she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, torture, and resisting and obstructing police.
During her sentencing hearing in January 2026, she called her child “my baby, my rock, my purpose.” Then she offered an apology and an explanation for how a mother could take the life of the child
She reportedly claimed that she had severe mental health decline which began during the COVID-19 pandemic because she believed the world was going to end.
So because of this belief, she and Austin largely secluded themselves inside their apartment prior to the crime.
She also cut off contact with friends and family, and her time online became consumed by doomscrolling which negatively affected her.
“After five years of not being out in the world, it became hard for me to tell what was real and not real with the algorithms on my phone being nothing but ‘the world is ending’ content,” Lee said in court.
“I fell so deeply into an echo chamber that we were living in a different reality and it was a terrible one.”
By November 2024, her thinking had become severely distorted as she believed the FBI was watching her from across the street, so she spent about eight hours a day watching the street from her window.
She also searched for hidden bugs in the apartment and, when she found none, became convinced mind-reading drones were targeting them.
Accirding to her, she was scared that the authorities would burst in at any moment and take them to concentration camps as part of the endtime
“My brain was broken,” Lee said in court. She also maintained that her actions grew out of a desperate desire to spare Austin from that imagined fate.
“I never intended for him to suffer in any way,” she said. “In my broken thinking, I was saving him. I love him with all that I am. It’s endless and my heart is broken.”
Lee had a history of driving while intoxicated—she pleaded guilty to DUI charges in 2009 and again in 2010—but according to her lawyers, nothing from the past pointed toward violence of this magnitude.
Austin Dean Pikaart, who loved Pokémon, fishing with his dad, and the thrill of roller coasters, was remembered in his obituary as an adventurous spirit with “a patient, gentle, kindhearted soul.”
On Monday, January 19, 2026, a judge sentenced Lee to a term of 60 to 90 years in prison, as per WZZN 14 News.
The earliest she will be eligible for parole is the year 2085, when she would be 100 years old.
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