A NANNY ACCUSED of killing two children she was caring for has been charged with first-degree murder in New York.
Yoselyn Orteha, 50, was charged with the fatal stabbing of six-year-old Lucia Krim and two-year-old Leo Krim at their New York apartment, shortly before their mother returned from a swimming lesson with her other daughter on week ago.
Ortega has been in a critical condition in hospital for the past week, suffering from self-inflicted wounds. Police were unable to speak with her as she was breathing with the help of a tube after cutting her throat and wrists.
New York City detectives have now visited Ortega at the NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she remains under police guard, the New York Times reports.
Police declined to give any details of her condition or possible motive for the killings, but friends have said that she recently appeared to be struggling emotionally and financially.
“She snapped,” the nanny’s sister, Celia Ortega, told The New York Post. “We don’t understand what happened to her mind.”
But relatives in Ortega’s native Dominican Republic said they were shocked by the allegations.
Miladys Ortega, the nanny’s older sister in the Caribbean nation, told The Associated Press on Saturday that her sister “loved those children.” She said the family felt the nanny was “unable to do that.”
- Additional reporting by the AP
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