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‘It Was Not Herself That Killed Them,’ Sister Testifies in Nanny Trial

NEW YORK — A few days before Yoselyn Ortega plunged a knife into two young children she had been hired to baby-sit, she woke in the dead of night and started throwing pots and pans at the walls of the kitchen in her family’s upper Manhattan apartment. Her sister rushed in to restrain her.

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‘It Was Not Herself That Killed Them,’ Sister Testifies in Nanny Trial
By
JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
and
JAN RANSOM, New York Times

NEW YORK — A few days before Yoselyn Ortega plunged a knife into two young children she had been hired to baby-sit, she woke in the dead of night and started throwing pots and pans at the walls of the kitchen in her family’s upper Manhattan apartment. Her sister rushed in to restrain her.

The next morning, Ortega told the sister, Delci Ortega, that she did not recall what had happened.

That was one of many bizarre moments family members described this week during Yoselyn Ortega’s murder trial in state Supreme Court in Manhattan.

After a week of testimony, a picture emerged of an eccentric, outwardly religious woman from a large family in the Dominican Republic, who was plagued by periodic bouts of crippling melancholy, severe headaches and high anxiety about crime. Depression runs in the family, her siblings said: At least three close relatives committed suicide.

Her family members described how Ortega appeared to be unraveling emotionally in the months before the murders, weeping frequently, losing weight and complaining of insomnia. She also spoke cryptically about hearing disembodied voices and fearing a “black man” was trying to divide her family.

None of the friends and family members who have testified so far warned Marina and Kevin Krim, the couple for whom Ortega worked as a nanny, that she seemed to be going through a crisis.

Ortega, 55, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and faces life in prison. She is accused of fatally stabbing 2-year-old Leo Krim and his 6-year-old sister, Lucia, inside the bathroom of the Krim’s Upper West Side apartment, before stabbing herself in the throat. Marina Krim discovered the grisly scene at about 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 25, 2013.

Ortega has entered a plea of not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect. If acquitted, she would be sent to a maximum security psychiatric hospital.

Her lawyer, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, contends that Ortega has experienced hallucinations and delusions since she was 16, but that her illness was never treated until after her arrest. The prosecution that maintains she killed the children because she was angry at their mother over her workload.

Ortega’s sisters, Delci Ortega, 60, and Miladys Garcia, 64, both testified that Ortega professed to love the Krim children. Despite her odd behavior, they said they had no clue that she wanted to hurt them.

“At no time did I think she was going to do this,” Garcia said. “It was not herself that killed them. She had become something else. Something evil.”

Her sisters said Yoselyn Ortega was born and raised in Santiago de Caballeros, a city in the Dominican Republic, where their father owned a bodega. When she was 16, a younger sister, Rosa, died suddenly. Ortega slipped into a black depression, unwilling to leave the house for a year, her sisters said. Eventually her parents took her to a doctor and she recovered, Garcia said.

In 1985, Ortega graduated from a local university with an accounting degree and moved to New York City, where Garcia was living in an apartment on Riverside Drive. Ortega found steady work at a printing company.

By 1995, she had married and given birth to a son, Jesus Alberto Frias. Four years later, she split up with her husband and took her toddler to the Dominican Republic, her family said. She gave him to Garcia, who had returned to the island, to raise, and returned to New York to seek work.

Though she worked many menial jobs, her only work as a nanny was taking care of her nephew’s children in Dallas for four months in late 2006 and early 2007, the children’s mother, Glendalys Garcia, 38, testified.

Frias said that while he and his mother were separated, she stayed in touch, calling him every day and visiting him four or five times a year. But it was not until 2008 that she returned to the Dominican Republic for an extended period, while Miladys Garcia went back to the United States. That year, in April, a close friend of Ortega’s shot himself in the head on the balcony of her childhood home, Frias said. He said his mother became a paranoid shut-in, so fearful of crime she would not let him go to baseball practice, and so scared of intruders that she made him hide under the bed every time a dog barked.

“She would step outside and she would hear someone say, ‘Go back, go back,'” Miladys Garcia testified. “She heard voices speaking to her.”

In August, Miladys Garcia returned to take charge of Frias, and Ortega, who was gaunt and complaining of constant headaches, flew back to New York.

A year and a half later, Ortega landed the job as a nanny with the Krims, through her sister, who was a nanny. She used a relative, Jacqueline Severino, as a false reference. Severino had no children, but wrote a glowing fictional review of Ortega for the Krims, according to evidence presented at trial.

For two years, Ortega thrived at the job, but then, in April 2012, she began to go to pieces emotionally, her family members testified. She quarreled with Miladys Garcia, who had the lease on the family apartment, and moved to the Bronx apartment of another relative.

That summer, she called Glendalys Garcia three or four times a day, saying she felt betrayed by her sister. “She cried every day,” Glendalys Garcia recalled. “She just said ‘pray for me.'”

In June, Frias, now a senior in high school, moved to the Bronx and in with his mother. The city school system had threatened to hold him back a year, so his mother took $7,500 in cash out of her savings to pay for a private Catholic school, he said.

By September, Ortega’s money was running low, and she was forced to move back in with Delci Ortega, who was now living at the family apartment on Riverside Drive, the witnesses said.

Over the next few weeks, Ortega complained to Delci that the Krims changed her schedule often, playing havoc with her own plans. She also complained of skin problems from detergents. One night she woke at 4 a.m., banged her head into the wall and plucked out her hair. “I want to go back to the way I was before,” Delci Ortega recalled her saying.

Every night Ortega prayed aloud in her narrow room on her twin bed, with a picture of the infant Jesus, candles and an illuminated Bible. “She prayed to God to take away all the things she was feeling in her body and mind,” Delci Ortega said.

The night before the murders, Ortega was “very nervous,” depressed and took medication for a headache, Delci Ortega said. Then Ortega told her sister to take “good care” of her son, “to raise him well” and let him know “that I do love him.”

She described how she had been hearing voices and had seen “a black man” who wanted to separate the family. Ortega said she had prayed for “the black man” to go away.

The next day, at 1:30 in the afternoon, Ortega visited a young neighbor in her building, Jennifer Reynosa. Ortega’s eyes were darting side to side, and she said she was being followed by a “black shadow” that spoke to her.

“It scared me,” Reynosa testified in Spanish. “I looked at her and said, ‘My God, this woman is crazy.”

A short time later, Ortega left for her job at the Krims.

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