The New York nanny accused of stabbing two children under her care last week is telling police that she was angry at her employers because they expected her to clean house as well as look after the kids.
New York Police told the New York Post Friday that the nanny, Dominican Republic native Yoselyn Ortega, started coming to last Sunday, a few days after she slit her own throat after stabbing little six-year-old Lucia and two-year-old Leo Krim in their Upper West Side, Manhattan apartment.
Their parents, Marina and Kevin Krim, had arranged to pay Ortega for an extra five hour a week for housekeeping work after she told them that she was strapped for cash. However, she didn’t think she should do housework.
The Krims were also concerned about Ortega’s job performance in the weeks before the Oct. 25 killings, telling her they might have to fire her if her work didn’t improve.
But still, Kevin Krim’s mother last week said the family treated Ortega as a member of the family, even buying her plane tickets so she could come to the Dominican Republic with them.
Marina Krim found her son and daughter dead in a bathtub after returning home with her other child, Nessie, three, who she had taken to a swimming lesson. She was to meet Ortega and the other children at the swimming pool, and when they didn’t show up, she went back to the family apartment, where she made the grisly discovery that her children were dead and Ortega had slashed her own wrists.
The nanny stabbed a kitchen knife into her own neck as the mother walked in, stabbing herself with so much force that she broke a vertebra in her neck, said police.
The children’s father, an MSNBC executive, was out of town when the slayings occurred.
Police said the nanny didn’t ask about the children when she came to, asking instead about her own family. Charges have yet to be filed against her.
Her sister Miladys said she spoke to the nanny just before the killings, and did not notice anything was wrong. But Ortega’s neighbors said she had appeared troubled in the weeks leading up the murders and she was struggling with money issues.
Ortega is still under treatment at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, and toxicology tests performed on her came back negative, so she wasn’t drunk or on drugs when the stabbings occurred.