A MOTHER'S ANGUISH
Endures hours on stand at nanny’s trial to relive horror of finding her children murdered
Oh, God. Oh, my God. I’m sorry. I need to look at her
The Upper West Side mother whose two young children were butchered by their nanny ripped the confessed killer as a “liar” Thursday — and then relived the horror of discovering their bloodied bodies at home.
Marina Krim struggled to compose herself during more than three hours of testimony in Manhattan Supreme Court, where she came face-to-face with Yoselyn Ortega for the first time since the shocking 2012 murders of little Lucia, 6, and Leo, 2.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” Krim said as she entered the courtroom and saw Ortega for the first time since her ultimate betrayal.
“Oh, my God, you are such a liar!” she seethed while staring daggers at her former nanny, who stared straight ahead.
“Oh, my God, I’m sorry. I need to look [at her]. My hands are tingling right now. You are just out of this world.”
The shaken mom, 41, apologized, telling lawyers, “I need you to be patient with me,” before finally sitting in the witness chair.
She dissolved into tears as prosecutors began questioning her about Lucia, who went by the nickname “Lulu.”
“Who’s your firstborn child?” prosecutor Stuart Silberg asked.
“Lucia Ursula Krim,” the mom answered after a long pause, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Ortega, 55, is charged with murder for stabbing to death Lucia and Leo on Oct. 25, 2012, in the Krims’ West 75th Street apartment, where she laid “their bodies on top of one another to bleed out in the bathtub,” prosecutors said.
“For the 90 minutes, she was alone with Lulu and Leo . . . She brutally butchered both children, slitting their throats,” prosecutor Courtney Groves said in her graphic opening statements, as Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. looked on from the back of the courtroom. “Leo was too small to struggle. But Lulu, 6 years old, fought back.”
Lucia was slashed almost 30 times as she tried to defend herself, while Leo suffered five mortal wounds. Both suffered such severe neck gashes that emergency responders believed they were decapitated, Groves told jurors.
“They tried to save them. But neither Lulu nor Leo had a pulse and Leo’s body was already cold,” the prosecutor said in her opening statement.
But it was Krim’s testimony that gripped the courtroom, drawing tears from both jurors and observers as the devastated mom was forced to relive her gruesome discovery that day.
The plan was for Ortega to meet Krim and her third child, then-3-year-old Nessie, at Lucia’s ballet class at 5:30 p.m. But red flags went up when the nanny failed to show up.
“I started sending text messages, ‘Where are you?’ I get to the street and I’m in full-on panic,” Krim recalled through tears. “I’m calling the defendant, and it’s either ringing or going straight to voicemail.”
The mom grabbed Nessie and rushed home. She recalled feeling “relieved” when she saw the kids’ stroller and Lucia’s ballet bag in the apartment. But something didn’t feel right. “I unlock the door. It’s just dark, super dark and super quiet. It’s just eerie,” she said. “I’m like, this is so weird. Where are they?
“It’s so awful — it’s like a total horror movie,” the mom said. “I go down, I walk down the hall . . . and I see a light on under the back of the door.
“Oh, my God, it’s so quiet. Oh, my God. Why is it so f- -king quiet?” she recalled thinking in sheer panic.
With Nessie’s hand in hers, she opened the bathroom door to discover her worst nightmare — Lucia and Leo’s blood-soaked, lifeless bodies and Ortega slashing at her own throat.
“First, I see Lulu,” Krim recalled, her head in her hands, her face a mask of pain. “And I instantly know that she’s dead ’cause she’s lying in the bathroom and her eyes are open like this.
And I see Leo — and they have blood on them.”
The horrified mom recalled screaming, “I hate you!” at Ortega before grabbing Nessie and fleeing the home.
“I told the doorman, ‘ My baby sitter killed my kids,’ ” Krim gasped on the stand. “I’ll never talk to them ever again. They’re dead. My kids are dead.”
She remembered banging her head against the marble pillars of her prewar apartment building, saying she wanted to “wake up from this nightmare that I knew wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.”
“One of the police officers told me to stop screaming. They threw a sheet over my head, but I peeked and I saw the gurney go by with my kids on it,” Krim said. “Oh, my God, that was sick.”
“She killed my best friends. These two kids were my best friends,” the mother said, sob- bing, before requesting a break.
As she stepped down from the stand for the lunch break, Krim — who with husband Kevin went on to have two more sons after the murders — stared directly at Ortega.
“You’re gross. You’re disgusting,” Krim snarled.
Heartbroken but unbowed, the mom also offered touching memories about her slain children.
Lucia loved learning how to speak Spanish in a “beautiful accent,” and Leo had “big brown eyes.”
“He loved to collect acorns off the ground. Those were my mornings with him,” Krim recalled.
Some of the jurors — a panel of seven women and five men — wiped tears from their eyes. Ortega, meanwhile, showed no emotion and kept her stare trained forward.
Prosecutors argued that Ortega was driven to kill out of jealousy and because Krim asked her to take on extra work around the house.
“[She] resented Marina Krim for everything she was and everything she had,” Groves said. “She seethed that Marina would ask her to do additional work.”
Ortega confessed to the murders from her hospital bed a week after they occurred, an NYPD police officer had testified at a pretrial hearing.
She also blamed Marina and Kevin (inset, opposite page), who worked as an executive at CNBC at the time. The dad, who could testify as well, was not in the courtroom.
“I had to do everything and take care of the kids,” Ortega groused to cops, according to prosecutors. “I worked as a baby sitter only, and she wanted me to do every- thing. She wanted five hours of cleaning every week.”
But Krim said she and her husband did everything they could to accommodate the down-on-herluck nanny, even buying her a plane ticket to her native Dominican Republic for Christmas.
Krim said she offered to pay Ortega, who had just been kicked out of her Bronx apartment, $20 an hour to do five hours of cleaning a week after firing her cleaning lady.
“She seemed eager to do that job,” Krim recalled, as Ortega shook her head in disagreement and leaned in to speak with her lawyer.
In her opening statement, defense attorney Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg argued that Ortega suffered from a mental illness and “lacked the ability to make any decision” the day of the killings.