Mother says she drowned 3 young children

Father voiced alarm about woman’s mental health and his kids’ safety for months.

The mother of three children found dead in a Reseda apartment admitted Thursday in a television interview to killing the kids.

From inside a Kern County jail, Liliana Carrillo told KGET-TV, an NBC affiliate in Bakersfield, that she killed her children in order to protect them from their father.

“I drowned them,” Carrillo said. “I wish my kids were alive, yes. Do I wish that I didn’t have to do that? Yes.”

The children’s father, Erik Denton, had been expressing alarm about Carrillo’s mental health and the safety of the children for months.

Carrillo was “extremely paranoid” and erratic, according to the father’s account in court papers, which described her increasingly bizarre claims: that she was “solely responsible” for the COVID-19 pandemic and that his hometown of Porterville was beset by a pedophile ring.

“I am afraid for my children’s physical and mental well-being,” Denton told a Tulare County judge last month. The judge agreed to grant physical custody to Benton.