Mother says she killed her children to protect them from their father

The mother of three children found dead in a Reseda apartment admitted Thursday in a television interview to killing the kids.

From inside a Kern County jail, Liliana Carrillo told KGET-TV, an NBC affiliate in Bakersfield, that she killed her children in order to protect them from their father.

“I drowned them,” Carrillo said. “I wish my kids were alive, yes. Do I wish that I didn’t have to do that? Yes.”

The children’s father, Erik Denton, had been expressing alarm about Carrillo’s mental health and the safety of the kids for months.

Carrillo was “extremely paranoid” and erratic, according to her boyfriend’s account in court papers, which described her increasingly bizarre claims: that she was “solely responsible” for the COVID19 pandemic and that his hometown of Porterville was beset by a pedophile ring.

“I am afraid for my children’s physical and mental well-being,” Denton told a Tulare County judge last month. The judge agreed to grant physical custody to Benton.

Los Angeles County prosecutors are expected to file murder charges against Carrillo later this week.

The children’s grandmother discovered the children — Joanna, 3; Terry, 2; and Sierra, 6 months — dead and their mother gone on Saturday morning at an apartment complex in Reseda, authorities said. Two of the children showed signs of drowning, and all three had injuries that indicated they were bludgeoned. No cause of death has been publicly released. The Los Angeles Police Department has identified Carrillo, 30, as the suspect in their killings.

Carrillo was transferred late Monday night from Tulare County to Kern County’s jail. She is being held on $2-million bail and is expected to appear in a Kern County court Wednesday on the charges.

The charges come amid growing scrutiny over why L.A. County social workers did not remove the children from her care. L.A. County’s child welfare agency and the Los Angeles Police Department were alerted, on numerous occasions, that Carrillo was a danger to the young children, according to interviews by The Times with the children’s father and his family, along with court records and sources familiar with the investigation. A Tulare County judge had awarded emergency custody to the children’s father in February.

LUIS SINCO/LOS ANGELES TIMES Neighbor Lupe Cuevas is overcome with emotion as police conduct an investigation at an apartment building in Los Angeles' Reseda neighborhood, where three children were reportedly killed by their mother on April 10.