The Screams Came From A Basement Daycare—Then A Screwdriver Was Found On A Child’s Body, Revealing A Family Tragedy That Began Hours Earlier 😱🔎💔
The parent dropping children off at Brown Bear Childcare heard screaming the moment he approached the house. He stepped inside the Hopkins, Minnesota, home and first thought Nathan Brown was performing CPR on his wife. Then he saw the screwdriver.
Nathan Matthew Brown, 41, was stabbing Kristen Ann Brown, 41, and their seven-year-old daughter Evie. The witness grabbed his own children and two others, fled outside, and called 911. By the time officers arrived, Kristen and Evie were dead in the basement. Nathan was found in an upstairs closet, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A screwdriver lay on the child’s torso.
The killings did not begin in Hopkins. Investigators believe Nathan first murdered his 78-year-old mother, Alice Anne Brown, at her home in Burnsville, where he had been living while the marriage collapsed. A relative discovered Alice’s body hours later. The sequence formed a single morning of family annihilation that left three generations dead and six other young children as witnesses to violence inside a licensed daycare.
Kristen had seen the end coming. About two weeks earlier she notified parents that Brown Bear Childcare would close because of relationship issues with her husband. On the morning of the attack she texted a friend around 8:45 a.m. that “things were crazy” and confirmed the daycare would shut down on August 27. She told the friend she planned to leave Nathan imminently. Twenty minutes later the parent walked in on the stabbings.
Kristen had built her professional life around children. She opened the basement daycare a few months after Evie’s birth in 2019, writing that she wanted to help her daughter and other children “blossom into happy, intelligent, caring individuals.” She offered organized activities, play-based learning, music and cooking classes, and field trips. State inspectors found the facility in compliance in recent years. The same space that once hosted Unicorn Day and orchard visits became the scene of the murders.
Nathan operated a landscaping business and had only two minor misdemeanors on his record—operating a snowmobile without a permit and fishing without a license years earlier. There was no history of police calls to the Hopkins address. Whatever private turmoil existed between the couple remained largely invisible to outsiders until the morning the screaming started.
The witness’s account, detailed in the search warrant, captures the sudden inversion of ordinary life. A father arriving for drop-off becomes an accidental witness to the murder of a mother and child. Children who should have been starting their day with play are hurried out of the house by a stranger. The screwdriver—an everyday tool—becomes the instrument of a double homicide carried out in full view of other toddlers and preschoolers. None of those children were physically injured, but the psychological impact of what they saw will likely follow them for years.
Hopkins police and Burnsville investigators continue to examine the timeline. Nathan had been staying at his mother’s home. The attack on Alice appears to have preceded the drive to Hopkins. After killing Kristen and Evie he went upstairs and ended his own life. The investigation has recovered cellphones, computers, and the screwdriver itself. Authorities have not publicly detailed a precise motive beyond the documented marital breakdown and Kristen’s stated intention to leave and close the business.
The case has forced a painful reckoning with how little outsiders can know about what happens inside a private home that also functions as a workplace for young children. Kristen’s letter to parents and her final text message show a woman trying to extract herself and her daughter from a failing marriage. Those steps coincided with the deadliest possible response. Alice Brown, providing temporary housing for her son, became the first victim in a chain that ended only when Nathan turned the gun on himself.
Family members have begun the process of identifying the dead and absorbing the scale of the loss. Kristen’s sister confirmed the identities to local media. The six children present that morning were reunited with their parents. The daycare that once promised a safe, nurturing environment is now a sealed crime scene. The ordinary objects of childhood—toys, learning materials, the basement space itself—sit alongside the evidence of sudden, irreversible violence.
Nathan Brown’s decision to use a screwdriver rather than a firearm for the attacks on his wife and daughter has drawn particular attention for its intimate brutality. The subsequent self-inflicted gunshot closed the immediate chapter of the crime but left the living to confront the questions that remain. How long had the marriage been deteriorating? Were there earlier signs that went unrecognized? What combination of rage, despair, or control drove a man to kill his mother, his wife, and his child in the span of a few hours?
The answers, if they come, will emerge through the continuing investigation and any future court proceedings related to the evidence. They will not restore the lives taken. Kristen Brown, who had spent years caring for other people’s children, died alongside her own daughter in the basement she had turned into a place of learning and play. Alice Brown died in the home where her son had been staying. Nathan Brown died by his own hand after ensuring the rest of his immediate family would not survive him.
A parent’s ordinary morning errand—dropping children at daycare—became the moment the violence was interrupted and reported. The screaming that drew him inside, the initial misperception of CPR, the realization that a screwdriver was the weapon, and the frantic evacuation of the other children form a sequence that has already been etched into the official record. For the families of the victims and for the children who were present, that sequence will never be ordinary again. The basement of Brown Bear Childcare, once filled with the sounds of small voices and structured play, now stands as the final setting of a family destroyed from within.