NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nanny Yoselyn Ortega stabbed to death two children in her care at their New York luxury apartment out of resentment that their mother was the parent “she could never be,” a prosecutor said on Thursday at the opening of Ortega’s murder trial.
A lawyer for Ortega told the jury she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, however, saying she was incapable of having an intent to kill on Oct. 25, 2012, when Lucia Krim, 6, nicknamed Lulu, and her brother Leo, 2, were killed.
“You will know a diseased mind when you see it,” defense lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg said in her opening argument at state Supreme Court in Manhattan.
Ortega, 55, is on trial for two counts of first-degree murder in the killings that grabbed headlines as “A Family’s Worst Nightmare.”
After returning to the family apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Marina Krim found her children’s bloody bodies in a bathtub and Ortega standing over them, plunging a knife into her own neck.
Marina Krim was called to the witness stand as one of the first to testify.
“The nanny viciously and violently attacked Lulu and Leo when she was alone in the apartment with them ... took knives from the kitchen,” Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Courtney Groves told the jury.
Groves said the evidence suggested that Ortega, who had been hired two years earlier by then CNBC executive Kevin Krim, resented his wife Marina for being the mother “she could never be.”
Ortega had recently brought her son, Jesus, 17, from the Dominican Republic and enrolled him in a private school so he did not have to repeat 11th grade. She was overwhelmed by financial concerns and the cost of tuition.
Groves said that when Marina Krim offered to find Ortega more work, Ortega was “enraged.” She planned the murders, waiting until she was alone with the children, Groves said.
“Lulu was 6 years old and she fought back. ... She fought to live,” Groves said.
Krim discovered the grisly scene when she returned home with the children’s then 3-year-old sister, Nessie, after Ortega failed to appear with the other children at Nessie’s swimming lesson.
Editing by Leslie Adler and Tom Brown