Murderous nanny jailed
helped with this by lying to them about Ortega’s personality and experience as a nanny. Ortega, who’s from the Dominican Republic, had been recommended by her sister, a nanny for another New York family, and her background and references were faked by her family. The consequences, the Krims said, were horrifying.
‘‘We miss hearing them call out my name and run to hug me when I got home from work,’’ the father said while crying. ‘‘We miss feeling their soft skin in our arms.’’ He eviscerated Ortega for not pleading guilty and forcing the case into a courtroom. He said she never should have put the family, the jurors or the audience through it.
‘‘The defendant is an evil and utterly dangerous narcissist,’’ he said. ‘‘It is right that she should live and rot and die in a metal case, like the ugly and dark shadow of Lulu and Leo’s bright and shiny lights.’’
The couple left the courtroom and didn’t return before Ortega asked for mercy, having never appeared to make eye contact with her.
‘‘I ask for a great deal of forgiveness,’’ Ortega said through a Spanish-English interpreter. ‘‘To God, to Marina, to Kevin. I wish my family had told them that I did not feel well.’’
But Judge Gregory Carro referred to Ortega as ‘‘pure evil’’ and said she should spend the rest of her life in prison.
During the seven-week trial, jurors grappled with whether Ortega had been too mentally ill to understand what she was doing when she killed the children.
The emotional testimony often kept the panel and the audience in tears. Jurors heard heartwrenching testimony from Marina Krim, who spoke of coming home to her eerily quiet apartment and finding her children covered in blood in the back bathroom.
Krim opened the door to the bathroom to discover the children’s bodies stacked in the tub. Lulu was stabbed more than 30 times, and Leo was stabbed five times.
Ortega had cut her own throat in a failed suicide attempt.
Prosecutors argued that Ortega was jealous of Marina Krim’s life and lashed out in the worst way possible – at her children. –AP A cure for the common cold could be nearer after British scientists successfully tested a drug molecule capable of killing multiple strains of the disease.
Until now it has been virtually impossible to vaccinate against cold virus because the condition is made of up a large family of different strains. Remedies have instead focused on treating symptoms, such as a sore throat, but researchers at Imperial College, London, ignored the disease itself and instead targeted the human protein ‘‘hijacked’’ by all strains of the virus.
Leading experts last night said the results, which are published in the journal Nature Chemistry, held ‘‘great promise’’ for a practical cure.
The research team will next test the drug in animal trials before moving on to humans. If successful, a new drug could be available within seven years.
The compound, IMP-1088, targets N-myristoyltransferase (NMT), a protein in human cells which cold viruses use to construct a protein ‘‘shell’’, which protects the virus genome.
– Telegraph Group