The father of two children allegedly murdered by their nanny testified at the babysitter’s trial yesterday about the day his six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son were killed.
As CrimeOnline previously reported, Yoselyn Ortega is on trial in Manhattan for the October 2012 murder of Lucia and Leo Krim. The children’s mother, Marina Krim, came home to find them bleeding out from multiple stab wounds in the bathtub, while Ortega was stabbing herself in the neck nearby.
On Tuesday, the children’s father Kevin Krim described the horrific day, as he gradually put together through reading and hearing messages left for him while he was on a flight that two of his children had died.
According to The Cut, Kevin Krim took a flight back to New York City from California on October 25, 2012. When the flight landed he turned on the phone to find dozens of voice and text messages, just before hearing the pilot announce that police officers were there to meet a passenger — him — who would get off the plane first.
According to The Cut, Krim pieced together that two of his children had died, but he didn’t know which two, and he had no idea what happened. He said he collapsed next to the airplane, and remembers the plainclothes police officers helping him stand back up. He saw that his wife, Marina, had left him a voicemail message.
“And I just heard this background noise of screaming, and I crumbled again,” Krim said in court.
The grieving father then described going to the hospital where it was confirmed that Lucia and Leo had died, and the heartbreaking scene when he said goodbye to his children.
“Lulu and Leo were lying on hospital tables covered in sheets up to their chins — they looked beautiful and strange,’’ Krim said, according to the New York Post.
“They were the wrong color, they didn’t have any blood left in them, so they were blueish. But they still had this perfect skin and these long eyelashes.”
“They’d had this, like, sandy brown hair, and you see [the doctors] had tried really hard to wash all the blood out, but there was still kind of an auburn tint to it that I remember to this day.”
Ortega has pleaded guilty by reason of insanity. Krim testified that he has two relatives who are schizophrenic, and had spent a good deal of time with them. When a prosecutor asked him if he saw signs of mental illness in Ortega — over the objections of defense attorneys — he said no.
The prosecution rested it case against Ortega on Tuesday.
[Feature image: Lucia and Leo Krim/Facebook]