Woman says she drowned children to protect them
A California woman admitted killing her three children, saying she hugged, kissed and apologized as she drowned her infant daughter and the girl’s 2- and 3-year-old siblings last weekend to save them from what she said would be a lifetime of sexual abuse.
In a jailhouse interview, Liliana Carrillo told KGETTV that she wanted to “protect” her kids — 3-year-old Joanna Denton Carrillo, her 2-year-old brother, Terry, and 6-month-old sister, Sierra — from their father amid a bitter custody battle.
Carrillo has alleged that the father, her ex-boyfriend, is part of a sex trafficking ring that she claimed runs rampant in Porterville, a small city in central California where the family lived until the end of February.
The kids’ father, Erik Denton, has denied Carrillo’s allegations and wrote in court papers seeking custody that she is delusional and it was unsafe for their children to be around her. Carrillo has not yet been charged in the children’s deaths in Los Angeles, and the investigation remains ongoing.
“I drowned them,” she said in the Thursday interview inside a Kern County jail.
“I did it as softly, I don’t know how to explain it, but I hugged them and I kissed them and I was apologizing the whole time,” she said. “I loved my kids.”
Carrillo’s children were found dead Saturday by their maternal grandmother in her apartment in Los Angeles. Carrillo was arrested later that day in Tulare County, nearly 200 miles (322 kilometers) north.
“I know that I’m going to be in jail for the rest of my life. It’s something I’ve come to terms with,” she said in the TV interview.
Many of Carrillo’s behaviors and claims appear to be associated with altruistic filicide, or when a parent kills a child out of love to end real or imagined suffering.