Mother Details Day She Found Her Children Slain in Bathroom

NEW YORK — As she approached the witness stand in a 13th-floor courtroom on Thursday, Marina Krim stopped midstride and turned to confront Yoselyn Ortega, who sat several feet away at the defense table.

“Oh, God — I just need a good look at you,” Krim said.

The last time the two women had been face to face was inside a bathroom in the Krims’ Upper West Side apartment 5 1/2 years ago. Ortega was Krim’s nanny. The mother had returned home to find two of her children fatally stabbed in a bathtub. Ortega was plunging the knife into her own neck and was covered in blood. Her eyes “were bugging out,” Krim said.

The searing testimony opened Ortega’s trial in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. At times crying, at other times pausing nervously, Krim recounted step-by-step how a routine afternoon morphed into panic that something had happened to her children — and described the awful moment when she found them.

It was the first time that the mother had spoken in detail publicly about the killings.

Ortega has been charged with two counts of murder in the first degree and two counts of murder in the second degree. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and the trial, which is expected to last about three months, is likely to turn on questions about her mental health history and her state of mind on the day of the slayings.

Before she made the gruesome discovery Oct. 25, 2012, Krim said, she knew something was wrong when she arrived at ballet class to pick up her daughter, Lucia, 6, known as Lulu. A dance instructor told Krim that her daughter had never shown up.

“Where are you?” Krim said she wrote in a text to Ortega, but the nanny did not respond, Panicking, Krim grabbed her third child, Nessie, then 3, whom she had taken to swimming classes, and rushed to her home.

The apartment was dark and eerily quiet, she said. The stroller for her son, Leo, 2, was in the living room, and Lucia’s backpack was on top of it. With Nessie in tow, she checked each room but couldn’t find the nanny or the children. She went downstairs and asked the doorman if they were home; he said they were.

Returning to the apartment, she realized she had not checked the bathroom. It was then that she noticed a light shining from underneath the door.

“First I see Lulu and I instantly know she’s dead,” Krim said through tears. “She’s lying there in the bathtub, her eyes open. I see Leo — they have blood on them, all over her dress. Then I see the defendant. I see blood all over her.” Nessie, who was by her mother’s side, screamed, the mother recounted. The two ran out of the apartment, and she told the doorman that her baby sitter had killed her children.

“It was the most awful feeling in the world,” Krim said. “She killed my best friends. These kids were my best friends.”

At times, Krim stared angrily at Ortega; other times she sobbed or laughed nervously as she tried to maintain her composure. Ortega, clad in a long-sleeve gray shirt, stared straight ahead as Krim testified before a packed courtroom. A man in the audience sobbed.

In her opening remarks, the assistant district attorney, Courtney Groves, said that Ortega, 55, resented Krim for providing for her children what Ortega could not give her own son.

Ortega had left her 4-year-old son in the Dominican Republic with her sister. He joined her in New York City in 2012 to finish high school and eventually go to college, the prosecutor said. By then, Ortega had been working for the Krims for more than two years after meeting the family through her sister. Unknown to the Krims, the prosecutor said, Ortega had provided a phony reference.

But the rent for her Bronx apartment, her son’s private school tuition and the cost of caring for a teenager became too much for Ortega, Groves said.

Krim tried to help by giving the nanny additional hours, but Ortega became enraged that her employer was trying to give her more work, which included cleaning, for an extra $100 a week. Ortega worked in the afternoon, helping to pick up and drop off the children, and was paid at least $500 a week.

On the day of the slayings, Ortega woke on time for work, sent her son to school, sent him a text to confirm he had arrived, got rid of her cellphone and left her identification and insurance card with her sister. She had seen a psychologist three days earlier.

“She was putting her affairs in order,” the prosecutor said. “She knew when she left for work she would not be coming home. Her plan was to kill the Krim children and then to kill herself.”

She arrived at the Krims’ apartment at 3 p.m., and Krim asked her to drop Lucia off at her dance class and to take Leo with her, the prosecutor said.

Ortega left but never took Lucia to her dance class. Before 4 p.m., Groves said, Ortega returned to the apartment. Once upstairs, she grabbed knives from the kitchen and stabbed Leo five times and Lucia 30 times in her neck and throughout her body, Groves said. The little girl tried to fight off the nanny, the prosecutor said. Ortega slit the children’s throats and left them to bleed out into the bathtub. Ortega, who had cut her wrists earlier, then plunged the knife into her throat, the prosecutor said.

There was no evidence before the slayings that Ortega suffered from a mental disease or defect, Groves said.

But the defense attorney, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, said Ortega and her family suffered “a string of tragedies, suicides, death and mental illness that has spanned generations.”

She said Ortega suffered from a chronic mental illness and had heard voices and had a distorted sense of reality since she was 16. But she had not been treated until she was hospitalized after the slayings. Van Leer-Greenberg said Ortega was “guarded in her symptoms and reluctant to seek care,” because any care in the Dominican Republic “was worse than what she was suffering.” “You will know a diseased mind when you see it,” she told the jury.

Krim testified that Ortega was always on time and reliable: “She was always where I needed her to be.” But there had been a bizarre incident in which Ortega was angry that her son could not attend public school without repeating the 11th grade. Krim said Ortega was so upset that she poked her in the chest as she spoke about it.

A photo of the Krim children was on display in the courtroom: Leo, in blue; Lulu and Nessie, their surviving sister, both in orange, sitting on a bench in sunny weather. When asked who was in the photo, Krim barely managed the words: “My kids.”