Nanny alleged to have murdered two children in New York
Mother 'psychotic' after finding boy, two, and girl, six, stabbed to death in bathtub and the help with throat slashed on Upper West Side
A New York mother returned home to her luxury apartment to find two of her children, a 2-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, fatally stabbed in a bathtub by the family's nanny, the authorities said.
The nanny herself lay gravely injured on the floor, near a bloody knife, with an apparently self-inflicted slash to her own throat.
The gruesome crime sent shockwaves through the wealthy enclave of the Upper West Side, where nannies are often an integral part of privileged children's lives.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the mother, Marina Krim, had left her flat a block from Central Park to take one of her other children, a three-year-old girl named Nessie, to a swimming lesson on Thursday afternoon. The two other children, Leo and Lucia, were left with the nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50.
When Krim returned around 5.30pm, the commissioner said, she found a dark apartment. She went back down to the lobby to ask the doorman if he had seen the nanny and her children. When told that they had not left the building, she returned to the apartment.
She looked around in the quiet rooms. Finally, she turned the lights on in the bathroom and discovered her two children in the bathtub and the nanny unconscious on the floor.
"There were bloodcurdling screams from a woman," said Rima Starr, the victims' second-floor apartment neighbour.
The screams prompted neighbours to call 911. Ortega was arrested as soon as the police arrived. She was taken to a hospital, where she was in critical but stable condition.
Krim's husband is Kevin Krim, a senior executive at CNBC. Marina Krim wrote a blog where she documented "life with the little Krim kids" and showed them in photos around New York City, eating Grey's Papaya hot dogs, pretending to use a pay phone, napping on the sofa and picking pumpkins.
On her blog, Krim described how she and her family had spent several days visiting Ortega's family in the Dominican Republic, speaking of how close her relationship had been with the family. "We spent half [our nine-day trip with] our nanny, Josie's sisters home in Santiago," she wrote. "We met Josie's amazing familia!!! And the Dominican Republic is a wonderful country!!"
Kelly said that given the horror Marina Krim had witnessed, it was now difficult for her to communicate.
Kevin Krim was told of the situation hours later, when he landed after a flight back to the city. He was met at the airport by the police, who told him what happened and took him to see his wife at St Luke's Hospital, where the couple remained on Thursday night, along with Marina Krim's sister.
There were no immediate explanations for what drove the nanny's actions. Paul Browne, the police department's chief spokesman, said he did not know if she left a note, and he could not immediately say how long she had worked for the family. The Krims moved to New York from California in recent years, neighbours said.
After the crime, neighbours described seeing Krim, a towel over her head, clinging to her one surviving child, being escorted by the police to an ambulance.
Starr said that when she saw Krim in the building's lobby, she was in a state of shock.
"She was screaming in a psychotic state," she said. "She was not lucid."
