In Nanny Trial, Defense Lawyers Try to Counter Police Testimony

NEW YORK — After several days of testimony in the trial of the former nanny charged with killing two of the children in her care, defense lawyers on Thursday began presenting their case, seeking to undercut the prosecution’s contention that the nanny had a motive for murder.

The nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 55, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of first-degree murder. Her defense attorneys contend that Ortega suffers from a chronic mental illness and was not in her right state of mind when she killed the Krim children — Lucia, 6, and Leo, 2 — on Oct. 25, 2012, in the family’s Upper West Side apartment.

Their mother, Marina Krim, returned home with a third child, Nessie, 3, and found her two other children dead and Ortega plunging a knife into her own neck.

In its case, the prosecution used the testimony of several witnesses, including Krim and the children’s father, Kevin Krim, to depict Ortega as stressed and sometimes odd but not mentally ill.

Prosecutors also presented evidence that suggested that resentment might have been the motive for the killings. Two days after the killings, Ortega tapped urgently on a hospital bedrail at around 7:30 p.m. to get the attention of a police officer guarding her, the officer, Sgt. Yoel Hidalgo, testified last week in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. She had been asleep and heavily sedated and could barely speak, but Hidalgo said, “She said she wanted to say something important to me.”

Over the next two hours, Hidalgo communicated with Ortega, reading her lips in Spanish as she struggled to whisper, and showing her an alphabet chart. Another officer, Detective Francis Brennan, who was standing outside the room at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital along with two prosecutors and another investigator, received handwritten notes from Hidalgo relaying what Ortega had said.

The notes provided the first hint of what might have motivated her to kill the children she had watched for two years. She told the sergeant that Marina Krim had not let her go to an appointment she had with a psychologist two days before the murders and that her work schedule varied each day.

“Boss Marina everyday has different schedule for me,” Hidalgo’s notes read. In a final note Hidalgo recorded around 10 p.m. after speaking with Ortega, she complained of having “to do everything,” including taking care of the children and cleaning for five hours a week.

But on Thursday, Ortega’s lead lawyer, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, tried to debunk the officer’s testimony, presenting evidence that Ortega was heavily sedated when she spoke to Hidalgo. The first witness for the defense, Dr. Philip Steven Barie, an attending surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, said he was one of several doctors who treated Ortega in the days after the killings.

Ortega had experienced various levels of sedation and was on as many as 18 medications at one point, according to documents presented to the jury. Barie said she often lacked the mental capacity to make decisions and had trouble communicating. “She was on all these meds and had a breathing tube,” he said.

After stabbing herself, Ortega had fallen and struck her head and had broken two bones in her neck. On Oct. 27, the same day the officer said he spoke with Ortega, she underwent cervical traction surgery to stabilize her spine. As part of the surgery, screws needed to be temporarily bolted to her head. Van Leer-Greenberg presented medical records in which doctors noted that Ortega was still intubated and sedated. She was too delirious to make medical decisions, Barie said.

On cross-examination, Barie acknowledged that the delirium waxed and waned, and that Ortega was taken off the sedatives once a day to let doctors assess her mental state. Doctors cut back on the sedatives the evening of Oct. 27 as they put her neck in traction, so it remains unclear how impaired her thinking was that evening, he said.