When Marina Krim returned to her Manhattan apartment on October 25, 2012, after taking her daughter to swim class, she looked forward to the typical end-of-day ritual: dinner, bedtime stories, and sleep. But thanks to her nanny, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
When she pushed open the bathroom door, she stumbled into the worst kind of nightmare, something so terrible that even the police had a hard time talking about it without saying it was “savage,” The Mirror reports. There she saw her babies, six-year-old Lulu and little Leo, just two years old, lying in a pool of blood. Their tiny bodies are full of knife wounds.
And right there, their nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, was trying to hurt herself with a knife. Prosecutors said the kids had been “intentionally and savagely slaughtered.” It was unbelievable that this murder was done by someone they trusted to look after their kids.
Marina testified that the scene looked like something out of a “total horror movie.” Leo was just a kid, too little to put up a fight, and Lulu was so brave, but she got hurt horribly. Ortega had been working as a nanny for the Krims for two years, and just grabbed knives from their kitchen and went wild. The kids had so many stab wounds that the cops first thought they’d been decapitated.
Marina said that when she saw all this, she just lost it.
She had a gut reaction to grab Nessie, her other kid, who thankfully was okay, and bolt into the hallway. The doorman freaked out and called 911. She talked about a grievous scream that came out of her: “It was a scream you can’t even imagine is inside of you.”
Here’s a clip about a similar case. Please be warned, though:
NEW: Bay area, California nanny caught on camera shaking, punching, and throwing a 2-day-old baby across the room.
It’s pretty mindblowing that these parents would leave their 2-day-old baby alone with a total stranger.
The video of the abuse was so graphic that ABC7 had to… pic.twitter.com/5kdUiSZRyV
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 27, 2024
Why would someone supposed to care for a family’s kids go and do something as terrible as that?
The prosecutors said that Ortega, the nanny, was jealous of Marina, the mother. They reckoned she had to watch this woman living a life she wanted but couldn’t have. She felt like she was overshadowing her, which ate away at her until she snapped.
On the flip side, Ortega’s lawyers said she had mental health issues. She’d been fighting with hallucinations, and apparently, she thought the devil was telling her to do it. But the jury wasn’t buying that and figured she was playing the crazy card to get off easy.
So, in the end, this nanny got a life sentence.
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The tragedy completely wrecked the Krims’ lives. Kevin, who worked at CNBC then, returned from a business trip to the worst news ever. The cops met him at the airport with news no parent should hear. That night, Marina was so desperate that she tried to bash her head on marble pillars, hoping to wake up from this terrible nightmare.
But out of something so unbearable, they found strength.
They had two more kids, Felix and Linus, and started the Lulu and Leo Fund. The fund helps kids be creative and shine like their first two did. Kevin put it like this in 2017: “We started the Lulu and Leo Fund in those early days to honor their creative, too-brief lives.”
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