On Friday morning a makeshift memorial had been set up outside the ornately detailed prewar building on the Upper West Side where the day before a mother had returned home to her luxury apartment on to find two of her children, a 2-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, fatally stabbed in a bathtub by the family’s nanny, the authorities said.
The nanny, who was found near the children with a bloody knife, remained in a hospital on Friday with an apparently self-inflicted slash to her own throat.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the mother, Marina Krim, had left her apartment at 57 West 75th Street to take one of her children, a 3-year-old girl, to a swimming lesson. She left the two other children with the nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50.
When Ms. Krim returned around 5:30 p.m., the commissioner said, she found a dark apartment. She went to the lobby and asked the doorman if he had seen the nanny and her children. Told that they had not left the building, she returned to the apartment. She looked around in the quiet rooms. Finally, she turned on the lights in the bathroom — and saw her two children in the bathtub and the nanny unconscious on the floor.
On Friday, two small children who appeared to be about the same ages as the two Krim children laid stuffed animals — a turtle and a dog — beside the flowers and candles that others had placed outside the building. Their mother watched.
Another woman who stopped in front of the building was Rachel Cedar, 35. She said her first thought when she woke up on Friday was that her two boys, ages three and five, “are safe in bed.”
“This poor mother is just like me,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I have a baby sitter who I adore and trust her implicitly. She’s like a sister to me.”
She shared more thoughts about having a nanny: “It’s the ultimate act of trust. You have to rely on other people. It’s hard to raise kids in New York.” She called what had happened in the apartment on the second floor “a betrayal.”
Rima Starr, a woman who lives down the hall from the victims’ family, described hearing “bloodcurdling screams from a woman” on Thursday afternoon. Ms. Starr also recognized a man’s screaming voice as that of the building superintendent. The screams prompted neighbors to call 911. Ms. Ortega was arrested as soon as the police arrived. She was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she was in critical but stable condition.
The police said that Ms. Krim and her husband, Kevin, had three children — Nessie, the 3-year-old who lived, and Lucia and Leo. Ms. Krim wrote a blog where she documented “life with the little Krim kids” and showed them in photos around New York City, eating Gray’s Papaya hot dogs, pretending to use a pay phone, napping on the sofa and picking pumpkins.
The investigation is in its earliest stages and detectives on Thursday night were somewhat hamstrung in conducting thorough intereveiws by the devastation the attack wrought both on the children’s’ parents and on Ms Ortega’s family, as well as by Ms. Oretega’s self-inflicted injuries, which led to her being placed in a medically induced coma, a law enforcement official said.
But so far, the police have uncovered nothing in the nanny’s background or in her relationship with either of the parents that would indicate any sort of problem, the official said. Ms. Ortega, the official said, had never had any trouble with the law, and there were no indications that she or anyone in her immediate family had any history of mental illness.
“No fighting with the mom, the family, the kids,” the official said. “Everybody is looking for a reason here,” the official said, adding, “We’ve got nothing bad other than the fact that she killed two children.”
“There was nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing that would indicate that there was anything going on, anything that would indicate this would occur. We’ve got nothing.”
The official said family members had indicated that the nanny had been “acting differently” in recent weeks, but her change in behavior was not characterized as depression and the precise nature and cause of it were unclear.
Detectives from the 20th Precinct and the Manhattan North Homicide Squad were conducting more interviews and were expected to revisit some of the people that they spoke with on Thursday, the official said. They were also reviewing Ms. Ortega’s telephone records and finances. The official said it appeared that she did not own a computer and was not particularly “tech savvy.”
On the Upper West Side, with its dual-income families in which nannies are often an integral part of children’s lives, pushing strollers or walking their charges by the dozens home from school in the afternoon, the news of the double killing was met with stark disbelief. In so many households, nannies are there for meal times, for bedtime, for birthdays and holidays, and go on vacations. Indeed, on her blog, Ms. Krim described how she and her family had spent several days visiting Ms. Ortega’s family in the Dominican Republic, speaking to just how close her relationship had been with the family.
“We spent the past 9 days in the Dominican Republic. We spent half the time at our nanny, Josie’s sisters home in Santiago,” she wrote. “We met Josie’s amazing familia!!! And the Dominican Republic is a wonderful country!! More pics to come!!”
Commissioner Kelly said that given the horror Ms. Krim had just witnessed, it was difficult for her to communicate. Mr. Krim was told of the situation hours later, when he landed after a flight back to the city. He was met at the airport by the police, who told him what happened and took him to see his wife at St. Luke’s Hospital, where the couple remained on Thursday night, along with Ms. Krim’s sister.
There were no immediate explanations for what drove the nanny’s actions. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said he did not know if she left a note behind, and he could not immediately say how long she had worked for the family. The Krims moved to New York from California in recent years, neighbors said.
A Harvard graduate, according to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Krim is an executive at CNBC and had previously worked at Bloomberg and Yahoo. Mark Hoffman, the president of CNBC, issued a statement on Friday that called the stabbings “a senseless act of violence.”
“There are simply no words to convey the magnitude of this tragedy,” Mr. Hoffman said.
Ms. Krim had worked in California for a wholesaler of powders made from exotic fruits, like acai berries and pomegranates, according to her LinkedIn profile.
A neighbor said that in New York, Ms. Krim largely devoted her time to her children. This past year she taught a weekly early-childhood art class at the Hippo Playground Parkhouse on 91st Street.
“Marina likes strolls in Central Park, doing art projects with the kids and delicious food,” according to a Web site set up for the wedding of one of Ms. Krim’s siblings.
In one post on her blog, Ms. Krim talked about how she cherished her time with her youngest child, the 2-year-old, who was known as Lito.
“One of the best parts of my day is after I drop both girls off at school and have 3 precious hours with little Lito all to myself. Ok, I’m near getting cheesy I adore this boy so much!!! He’s obsessed with collecting acorns he finds ‘on the floor,’ he loves riding ‘the school bus’ and he happily plays by himself for long periods of time. Here he has set up his kitchen in the living room and is ‘making bacon’ (not sure where he learned the word ‘bacon’).”
Ms. Ortega lives a few miles away, on Riverside Drive in Harlem. Marcelina Lovera, a neighbor of Ms. Ortega, said she had moved to New York from the Dominican Republic. She had not been officially charged as of Thursday night.
“I’m still shocked,” Ms. Lovera said. “She seems like a normal person. I wouldn’t expect that from her.”
Outside Ms. Ortega’s apartment, a woman could be heard through the closed door wailing, “Por qué dios mio, por qué?”
Neighbors said she lived with her three sisters and had an adolescent son. They described her as industrious and unremarkable. All expressed disbelief that she could commit a crime so heinous.
On the Upper West Side, neighbors described seeing Ms. Krim, a towel over her head, clinging to her one surviving child, being escorted by the police to a waiting ambulance.
Ms. Starr said that when she saw Ms. Krim in the building’s lobby, she was in a state of shock. “She was screaming in a psychotic state,” she said. “She was not lucid.”
Ms. Starr said she did not know her neighbor well but described a young, loving couple, often seen on neighborhood streets with a big, friendly greyhound named Babar.
She had seen Ms. Ortega in the building, she said, but never got the sense of anything being out of the ordinary.
“I rode in the elevator with the nanny just the day before yesterday,” Ms. Starr said. “I was making small talk. She was sort of unfriendly, didn’t want to interact. But I didn’t notice anything strange or weird.”
Reporting was contributed by James Barron, Joseph Goldstein, Kia Gregory, Anemona Hartocollis, Daniel Krieger, William K. Rashbaum and Jack Styczynski.
The nanny, who was found near the children with a bloody knife, remained in a hospital on Friday with an apparently self-inflicted slash to her own throat.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the mother, Marina Krim, had left her apartment at 57 West 75th Street to take one of her children, a 3-year-old girl, to a swimming lesson. She left the two other children with the nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50.
When Ms. Krim returned around 5:30 p.m., the commissioner said, she found a dark apartment. She went to the lobby and asked the doorman if he had seen the nanny and her children. Told that they had not left the building, she returned to the apartment. She looked around in the quiet rooms. Finally, she turned on the lights in the bathroom — and saw her two children in the bathtub and the nanny unconscious on the floor.
On Friday, two small children who appeared to be about the same ages as the two Krim children laid stuffed animals — a turtle and a dog — beside the flowers and candles that others had placed outside the building. Their mother watched.
Another woman who stopped in front of the building was Rachel Cedar, 35. She said her first thought when she woke up on Friday was that her two boys, ages three and five, “are safe in bed.”
“This poor mother is just like me,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I have a baby sitter who I adore and trust her implicitly. She’s like a sister to me.”
She shared more thoughts about having a nanny: “It’s the ultimate act of trust. You have to rely on other people. It’s hard to raise kids in New York.” She called what had happened in the apartment on the second floor “a betrayal.”
Rima Starr, a woman who lives down the hall from the victims’ family, described hearing “bloodcurdling screams from a woman” on Thursday afternoon. Ms. Starr also recognized a man’s screaming voice as that of the building superintendent. The screams prompted neighbors to call 911. Ms. Ortega was arrested as soon as the police arrived. She was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she was in critical but stable condition.
The police said that Ms. Krim and her husband, Kevin, had three children — Nessie, the 3-year-old who lived, and Lucia and Leo. Ms. Krim wrote a blog where she documented “life with the little Krim kids” and showed them in photos around New York City, eating Gray’s Papaya hot dogs, pretending to use a pay phone, napping on the sofa and picking pumpkins.
The investigation is in its earliest stages and detectives on Thursday night were somewhat hamstrung in conducting thorough intereveiws by the devastation the attack wrought both on the children’s’ parents and on Ms Ortega’s family, as well as by Ms. Oretega’s self-inflicted injuries, which led to her being placed in a medically induced coma, a law enforcement official said.
But so far, the police have uncovered nothing in the nanny’s background or in her relationship with either of the parents that would indicate any sort of problem, the official said. Ms. Ortega, the official said, had never had any trouble with the law, and there were no indications that she or anyone in her immediate family had any history of mental illness.
“No fighting with the mom, the family, the kids,” the official said. “Everybody is looking for a reason here,” the official said, adding, “We’ve got nothing bad other than the fact that she killed two children.”
“There was nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing that would indicate that there was anything going on, anything that would indicate this would occur. We’ve got nothing.”
The official said family members had indicated that the nanny had been “acting differently” in recent weeks, but her change in behavior was not characterized as depression and the precise nature and cause of it were unclear.
Detectives from the 20th Precinct and the Manhattan North Homicide Squad were conducting more interviews and were expected to revisit some of the people that they spoke with on Thursday, the official said. They were also reviewing Ms. Ortega’s telephone records and finances. The official said it appeared that she did not own a computer and was not particularly “tech savvy.”
On the Upper West Side, with its dual-income families in which nannies are often an integral part of children’s lives, pushing strollers or walking their charges by the dozens home from school in the afternoon, the news of the double killing was met with stark disbelief. In so many households, nannies are there for meal times, for bedtime, for birthdays and holidays, and go on vacations. Indeed, on her blog, Ms. Krim described how she and her family had spent several days visiting Ms. Ortega’s family in the Dominican Republic, speaking to just how close her relationship had been with the family.
“We spent the past 9 days in the Dominican Republic. We spent half the time at our nanny, Josie’s sisters home in Santiago,” she wrote. “We met Josie’s amazing familia!!! And the Dominican Republic is a wonderful country!! More pics to come!!”
Commissioner Kelly said that given the horror Ms. Krim had just witnessed, it was difficult for her to communicate. Mr. Krim was told of the situation hours later, when he landed after a flight back to the city. He was met at the airport by the police, who told him what happened and took him to see his wife at St. Luke’s Hospital, where the couple remained on Thursday night, along with Ms. Krim’s sister.
There were no immediate explanations for what drove the nanny’s actions. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said he did not know if she left a note behind, and he could not immediately say how long she had worked for the family. The Krims moved to New York from California in recent years, neighbors said.
A Harvard graduate, according to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Krim is an executive at CNBC and had previously worked at Bloomberg and Yahoo. Mark Hoffman, the president of CNBC, issued a statement on Friday that called the stabbings “a senseless act of violence.”
“There are simply no words to convey the magnitude of this tragedy,” Mr. Hoffman said.
Ms. Krim had worked in California for a wholesaler of powders made from exotic fruits, like acai berries and pomegranates, according to her LinkedIn profile.
A neighbor said that in New York, Ms. Krim largely devoted her time to her children. This past year she taught a weekly early-childhood art class at the Hippo Playground Parkhouse on 91st Street.
“Marina likes strolls in Central Park, doing art projects with the kids and delicious food,” according to a Web site set up for the wedding of one of Ms. Krim’s siblings.
In one post on her blog, Ms. Krim talked about how she cherished her time with her youngest child, the 2-year-old, who was known as Lito.
“One of the best parts of my day is after I drop both girls off at school and have 3 precious hours with little Lito all to myself. Ok, I’m near getting cheesy I adore this boy so much!!! He’s obsessed with collecting acorns he finds ‘on the floor,’ he loves riding ‘the school bus’ and he happily plays by himself for long periods of time. Here he has set up his kitchen in the living room and is ‘making bacon’ (not sure where he learned the word ‘bacon’).”
Ms. Ortega lives a few miles away, on Riverside Drive in Harlem. Marcelina Lovera, a neighbor of Ms. Ortega, said she had moved to New York from the Dominican Republic. She had not been officially charged as of Thursday night.
“I’m still shocked,” Ms. Lovera said. “She seems like a normal person. I wouldn’t expect that from her.”
Outside Ms. Ortega’s apartment, a woman could be heard through the closed door wailing, “Por qué dios mio, por qué?”
Neighbors said she lived with her three sisters and had an adolescent son. They described her as industrious and unremarkable. All expressed disbelief that she could commit a crime so heinous.
On the Upper West Side, neighbors described seeing Ms. Krim, a towel over her head, clinging to her one surviving child, being escorted by the police to a waiting ambulance.
Ms. Starr said that when she saw Ms. Krim in the building’s lobby, she was in a state of shock. “She was screaming in a psychotic state,” she said. “She was not lucid.”
Ms. Starr said she did not know her neighbor well but described a young, loving couple, often seen on neighborhood streets with a big, friendly greyhound named Babar.
She had seen Ms. Ortega in the building, she said, but never got the sense of anything being out of the ordinary.
“I rode in the elevator with the nanny just the day before yesterday,” Ms. Starr said. “I was making small talk. She was sort of unfriendly, didn’t want to interact. But I didn’t notice anything strange or weird.”
Reporting was contributed by James Barron, Joseph Goldstein, Kia Gregory, Anemona Hartocollis, Daniel Krieger, William K. Rashbaum and Jack Styczynski.