‘Evil’ inside
Jury hears of nanny’s icy stare after killing kids
A BUILDING SUPER recalled the moment he came face to face with “the devil” inside an Upper West Side apartment where a nanny had killed two children.
The testimony Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court from the super, Michael Minihan, featured a chilling account of suspect Yoselyn Ortega’s eyes bulging as she gasped for air and bled from a self-inflicted knife wound on her neck.
Minihan, who has five kids of his own and lived directly below the Krim family, recalled rushing to the bloody apartment on Oct. 25, 2012, after hearing mom Marina Krim’s blood-curdling cries.
Krim (photo inset) was on the mezzanine “holding her middle child Nessie, screaming incoherently,” Minihan said.
“They’re dead! They’re dead,” was all he could make out, he said in testimony at Ortega’s first-degree murder trial.
Minihan went inside Krim’s apartment, and as he got closer to the back bathroom where the children were butchered, he said he “started to hear, like, labored breathing from gurgling.”
The first thing he saw was Ortega, “staring . . . the eyes of the devil in my face,” he said.
“Her eyes were bulging,” Minihan recalled.
Ortega was clutching her blood-soaked throat. She’d stabbed herself in the neck in a suicide bid after killing the kids.
When asked whether he saw the mutilated and bloodied bodies of Lulu and Leo Krim, 6 and 2, Minahan got choked up.
He avoided looking in their direction, he said.
“I could see the tub, and I could see a body or something. I tried as best as I could not to take my eyes off Ms. Ortega but I could see there was a mess,” he said, fighting back tears. “I just saw red.” Ortega left Lulu and Leo in the bathtub to bleed to death after repeatedly stabbing and slashing them in a heartless bid to spite their mother — out of jealousy over her employer’s privileged life, prosecutors say. She waited until their mother arrived to stab herself in the throat so that she could revel in the devastated woman’s pain and horror, according to prosecutors. Minihan barricaded himself outside the apartment, preventing Ortega from leaving — though she was in no condition to attempt an escape. “I didn’t want anybody to escape. Whoever was in the apartment, for whatever reason, they weren’t getting out,” said Minihan, who has worked at the La Rochelle building on W. 75th St. for about a decade.
NYPD Detective Bradley Gore, the first cop on the scene, recalled coming upon Minihan at the door.
“Whatever’s in there is evil,” Minihan said, according to Gore.
Ortega was on the ground and struggling for air from her self-inflicted knife wound when Gore entered the crime scene.
Gore recalled checking for a pulse on both children.
“No sign of life,” he said on the stand.
In further testimony, other seasoned first responders described the scene as profoundly disturbing.
One paramedic, Eugene Darden Nicholas, said only Ground Zero was more gruesome than the crime scene in the apartment.
Ortega’s attorneys are expected to argue she is not responsible for murder by reason of insanity.