Rips ‘disgusting’ butcher nanny in slay trial
A HEARTBROKEN mother whose two young children were butchered in their Upper West Side home confronted the diabolical nanny accused of stabbing and slashing them to death in 2012, telling jurors in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday that the harrowing ordeal “was a total horror movie.”
Marina Krim sobbed and shook on the witness stand as she recalled the shock of seeing the lifeless, blood-drenched bodies of 6-year-old Lulu and 2-year-old Leo in an apartment bathtub.
Krim, 41, lashed out at Yoselyn Ortega, the woman she entrusted with her family, cursing her for the savage betrayal that left an eternal hole in her heart.
“You’re gross. You’re disgusting!” Krim screamed at Ortega in their first face-to-face since the kids were killed inside their family’s W. 75th St. apartment Oct. 25, 2012.
“She killed my best friends. Like these two kids were my best friends,” Krim said through tears. “I lost my two best friends. I don’t know what else to say. “Oh, God — it’s awful!” Ortega, 55, was supposed to meet Krim that day with the children for her daughter’s ballet class.
When the nanny and the kids didn’t show, Krim returned home with her 3-year-old daughter Nessie to see what happened.
“It was so awful. It was a total horror movie,” Krim said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh God, it’s so quiet. Why is it so f---ing quiet?
“I open the door and I’m just like — it took my breath away ... First I see Lulu and I instantly know that she’s dead because she’s lying in the bathtub and her eyes are open. And I look next to her and I see Leo and they have blood all over them, all over her little dress.”
Krim said she scream ed, grabbed Nessie’s little hand and fled the apartment. The distraught mom said she told Ortega “I hate you” before rushing out with the traumatized child. “I told the doorman, ‘My baby-sitter killed my kids,’ ” Krim said. “They’re dead. My kids are dead.” Earlier, prosecutors painted Ortega as a jealous, calculating killer, bent on punishing Krim for leading an idyllic life the nanny could not have. So sadistic was the baby-sitter that she waited until she could confirm that Krim had seen the bodies before she tried to kill herself. Ortega stabbed herself in the neck after the murders, but survived the suicide attempt. Prosecutors said Ortega’s ability to calculate and carry out the killings debunks her insanity defense. “There is no credible evidence that you will hear to establish any mental disease or defect that overcomes the truth in this case,” Assistant DA Courtney Groves (inset below) said.
Groves said that even though Lulu was only 6, she put up a fight with her attacker to stay alive.
Lawyers for Ortega argue she was too mentally ill at the time to be held legally responsible.
“I will ask you to determine at the end of this case whether or not these acts were driven by my client’s acute psychotic state,” Ortega’s lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg told jurors.
If Ortega is found not responsible for her actions due to mental illness, she will likely be placed in a psychiatric facility for the remainder of her life instead of prison.
But if convicted on the top murder counts, Ortega faces life in prison without parole.
The Krim family grew by two again after the tragedy. Felix was born in 2013 and Linus was welcomed into the family in 2016.