A mother has been sentenced to 39 years in prison for extracting blood from her nine-year-old son and making her other two children wear casts and neck braces.
Jordan Nicole Borders, 34, was found to have diagnosed two of her kids with brittle bone disease despite them being perfectly healthy.
The mother was found guilty of torturing her three children and received a 468-month sentence in Minnesota’s Crow Wing County District Court.
Doctors from multiple hospitals first suspected Borders after her kids began to have unexplained health problems over the space of three years.
They noticed a sudden decline in her nine-year-old son’s haemoglobin levels.
As surgeries and test results failed to explain the child’s health issues, experts began suspecting the mother’s involvement in either causing or faking his conditions.
Despite the mother’s claims that the hospital was drawing too much blood, her other children—a girl aged eight and a boy aged 11—disclosed that they frequently witnessed her taking their brother’s blood.
The then nine-year-old told investigators that his mum would extract his blood often and it made him feel “sick-sleepy”.
Investigators discovered that Borders was also treating her two other children for non-existent medical conditions.
She had allegedly diagnosed the children with brittle bone disease, forcing them to use casts and neck braces with materials stolen from a doctor’s office.
The 11-year-old boy was forced to wear casts for two years, prosecutors allege.
When cops searched the family home in Crow Wing County, they also found syringes.
During the trial, the children described enduring various forms of abuse.
Borders would allegedly force them to stand out in the cold with no clothes, deprive them of food and subject them to death threats.
The nine-year-old boy told investigators he was forced to sleep on the floor and stay in a wheelchair whenever his father came home.
The mother was convicted in June on charges of attempted first-degree murder, three counts of child torture, in addition to three charges of stalking and four charges of theft by false representation.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said: “Borders’ crimes are some of the most heinous and agonising I have seen in my time as attorney general.”
He added: “The facts we proved in court are nothing short of horrifying.
“It strains the imagination and breaks my heart into pieces to think about the torture and anguish – physical, mental, and emotional – that Borders inflicted on her own children.”
Borders raked in over $18,000 (£14,000) from the state of Minnesota and an estimated $35,000 (£27,000) from non-profit organisations by faking her son’s illness.
Judge Patricia Aanes said the mum had acted with “particular cruelty”.
It comes as fugitive Travis Decker, 32, is accused of killing his three young daughters and leaving their bodies at a campsite in Washington state after what was supposed to be a three-hour custody visit on May 30.
Their mum, Whitney Decker, reported them missing after Decker failed to drop them off at home in Wenatchee, 150 miles east of Seattle.
