Trial opens for mom in drowning of 2 sons
Accused of killing boys in bathtub at home
A year before Laurel Michelle Schlemmer was accused of drowning two of her sons in the family bathtub, she ran them over with her minivan.
It was April 16, 2013, and Ms. Schlemmer took the boys, Luke, then 2, and Daniel, then 5, to her parents’ house in Marshall. Ms. Schlemmer pulled into the garage, and the boys got out.
Then, according to the prosecutor trying Ms. Schlemmer this week on homicide charges, she tied the boys with twine and put them behind the van. Ms. Schlemmer then put the vehicle in reverse “and drove over them — not once, not twice, but three times,” said assistant district attorney Lisa Pellegrini.
Luke suffered a jaw fracture, a liver laceration, a pancreatic injury and a fractured ankle. Daniel had a broken pelvis.
On April 1, 2014, Ms. Pellegrini said in her opening statement Wednesday, Ms. Schlemmer “succeeded in what she’d been trying to do all those years.”
She killed Luke and Daniel by holding them under 5 inches of water in the bathtub, the prosecution contends.
The prosecution called 13
witnesses Wednesday as trial began for Ms. Schlemmer, 43, who is charged with homicide, endangering the welfare of children and tampering with evidence.
Ms. Schlemmer chose to have a non-jury trial before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning. She has offered a mental infirmity defense, meaning that in addition to a traditional verdict of guilty or not guilty on first- or thirddegree murder, the judge could also find Ms. Schlemmer not guilty by reason of insanity or guilty but mentally ill.
Ms. Pellegrini said Ms. Schlemmer decided to drown her two youngest sons as she walked home from dropping off her oldest son, who was 7, at his bus stop that morning.
“She thought she’d be a better mother to Joshua if her other two children would go to heaven,” Ms. Pellegrini said.
Ms. Schlemmer sent the boys upstairs to take off their pajamas — Superman for Luke, Spider-Man for Daniel. In a video-recorded interview, Ms. Schlemmer told police the boys then got in the tub.
“These crazy voices were prompting me to act irrationally, and I changed clothes, and I got in there with them and held them underwater, and I felt like I was looking down on the whole thing — just kind of out of body. And then I freaked out and got out and changed my clothes and got them out,” she said.
When McCandless Officer Todd Ray arrived after she called 911, he said he found the boys were naked and dry, but their hair was damp and appeared as if it had been recently combed. Luke was pronounced dead about an hour later. Daniel, who never regained consciousness, died a few days later at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC.
About three hours after the 911 call, Ms. Schlemmer spoke to Allegheny County homicide detectives. At first, she said she put the boys in the tub and went to use the bathroom in the master bedroom, taking about 10 minutes. Ms. Schlemmer said that when she returned to the boys, they were face down in the tub and unresponsive.
Detective Steven Hitchings said he told her it was unusual for children of that age to drown in a bathtub without having suffered some kind of head trauma first that would have rendered them unconscious. It was then, he testified, that Ms. Schlemmer said she wanted to tell him the truth.
That’s when she recounted hearing “crazy voices,” Detective Hitchings said.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Michael Machen, who deferred his opening statement, asked Detective Hitchings what he thought when Ms. Schlemmer told him that.
“That she was probably crazy,” the detective answered. “Anyone that would kill their own children is not right in their head.”
Earlier Wednesday, Northern Regional police Detective Scott Rick testified that he investigated the April 2013 incident with the van. He said Ms. Schlemmer told him she thought the boys had moved out of the way as she backed the van out of the garage so her father could park inside.
“She said she hit the accelerator too hard and went back too fast, felt a bump and knew she ran over the kids,” Detective Rick said.
“She did not know where the children were and did not know how many times she hit them.”
Instead of calling an ambulance, Ms. Schlemmer waited for her father to arrive, and they took the boys to UPMC Cranberry.
The hospital staff called police, and a nurse, Jennifer Taylor, called ChildLine, the state’s child abuse reporting center, to relay her concerns about possible abuse.
But Jonathan Filipicic, the nursing director at the hospital, spoke with a person from ChildLine an hour later and reported, “This is truly an accident.”
“Did you know that?” Ms. Pellegrini asked. “No,” he answered. Because of his statements, the ChildLine report was voided. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Welfare said department records indicated that Allegheny County Children, Youth and Families workers investigated while the children were hospitalized and determined it was an accident.
Because of that determination, the state was not called in to investigate, she testified.