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The news that Ronald Exantus is out of custody after the brutal 2015 stabbing that cost six-year-old Logan Tipton his life has left a lot of Americans rightly furious. Records show Exantus was listed as out of custody and his mandatory reentry supervision began on October 1, 2025 — a date that will ring like salt in the wounds of a grieving family.
On that December night in 2015, Exantus drove from Indianapolis to Versailles, slipped into the Tipton home through an unlocked door, and stabbed the sleeping child with a kitchen knife while other family members were injured trying to stop him. The father, Dean Tipton, tackled the attacker and the family has spent the last decade rebuilding around the unspeakable loss of their little boy.
The legal result only deepened the outrage: a jury found Exantus not guilty by reason of insanity on the murder count while convicting him, guilty but mentally ill, on multiple assault charges, producing a 20-year sentence in 2018. That split verdict and the Kentucky Supreme Court’s later ruling leaving the convictions intact illustrate how our legal system’s handling of mental illness can create outcomes that feel, to victims, like a denial of justice.
Now the man who stabbed a six-year-old is walking free under parole rules that credited good behavior and education programs, with his supervision set to continue only through June 2026 and portions of his reentry reportedly to be served in Florida. The technicalities of good-time credits and concurrent sentences matter to bureaucrats and judges, but to parents they read like a system that calculates the value of a child’s life in credits and time-served.
The Tipton family’s anguish is raw and understandable; they have publicly questioned how anyone responsible for a child’s death could be back in the world so soon, and that pain has metastasized into anger — a natural human reaction when institutions appear to side with process over people. The refusal of the state to offer victims basic notifications, security planning, or even an empathetic conversation about their safety speaks to a culture that increasingly protects procedures at the expense of victims’ rights and common-sense accountability.
Hardworking Americans should see this as a wake-up call: we need parole reform that respects the severity of violent crimes against children, tighter scrutiny of insanity defenses that can leave victims without real justice, and mandatory victim protections when dangerous individuals are released. Lawmakers and prosecutors must stop appeasing theory when lives are on the line and start standing squarely with victims and public safety — because no amount of bureaucratic jargon will ease the ache of a father who lost his boy.
