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A New York City nanny was convicted of murdering the two children she cared for by stabbing them in the bathtub of their apartment in 2012, multiple outlets report.
Yoselyn Ortega had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of 6-year-old Lucia Krim and her brother, 2-year-old son, Leo Krim.
Jurors were charged with deliberating whether the 55-year-old nanny intentionally killed the children in her care– or if she had descended into such a severe state of psychosis that she didn’t know what she was doing.
Ortega faces life in prison. She will return to State Supreme Court in Manhattan for her sentencing on May 14, according to NBC.
After killing the children with a kitchen knife in the bathtub of their Upper West Side apartment on Oct. 25, 2012, Ortega stabbed herself in the neck in front of their mother, Marina Krim, and the victims’ then 3-year-old sister, in a failed suicide attempt.
The trial began on March 1, when Marina Krim spent seven emotional hours testifying about how she came home and found her children — whom she called her “two best friends” — dead. She likened walking down the hall toward the bathroom where their lifeless and bloodied bodies lay to “a total horror movie,” ABC News reports.
On Monday, during closing arguments, Assistant District Attorney Stuart Silberg told the jury that Ortega planned to kill the children when she repeatedly stabbed them.
“She did it intentionally with a full understanding of exactly what it was she was doing — every stab, every slash,” Silberg told the jury, the New York Times reported.
Silberg argued that Ortega planned the murders ahead of time by leaving insurance papers in an envelope for her sister, Delci Ortega, and by asking her the day before the slayings to care for her teenage son and “raise him well,” the Times reports.
Silberg argued that Ortega killed the children because resented the children’s mother for overworking her.
Defense attorney Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg argued that severe psychosis drove Ortega to stab and murder the children. “The reason for the defendant’s actions lay within her delusional mind,” she said, local station CBS2reports.
In the weeks before the murders, Ortega’s mental illness began spiraling out of control, Van Leer-Greenberg said. “She was coming apart at the seams,” Van Leer-Greenberg said, the Times reports. “It was getting more chaotic in her head. The voices were overtaking her. Then on Oct. 25, 2012, she capitulated.”
Ortega’s sister, Miladys Garcia, 64, testified that Ortega sounded like she’d been overtaken by a “demon” when she spoke to her by phone just hours before the slayings, New York magazine reports
“It was not her,” Garcia testified, according to New York. “It was a demon. I know her voice. It was like I was talking to a demon. She had become something evil.”
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