Yoselyn Ortega, the 50-year-old nanny has been arrested Thursday for allegedly stabbing to death two young children in Manhattan. Family members of the nanny are saying that she wasn't herself for the last couple of months and that she just "snapped."
"Over the last couple of months was not herself," family members told detectives, reports The New York Times.
"She snapped," her tearful sister, Celia Ortega, told the New York Post. "We don't understand what happened to her mind."
Ortega lived in a crowded Upper Manhattan's Hamilton Heights apartment with her 17-year-old son, a sister and a niece. The Times reports that neighbors said Ortega would go door-to-door selling cheap cosmetics and jewelry to neighbors and described her as being "distant and moody."
"She was, according to others, seeking some professional help," chief police spokesperson Paul J. Browne said of Yoselyn Ortega, adding, "There were financial concerns."
"She lost a lot of weight. She looked very unhealthy. It looked like she was going through some problems," Ortega's neighbor, Ruben Diaz, 49, told the Post. "She had aged a lot - like seven years in a few months.
Lucia, 6, and Leo Krim, 2, were allegedly stabbed to death with a kitchen knife by their nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, on Thursday afternoon. NYPD Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told reporters on Friday that police believe Ortega turned the knife on herself -stabbing herself and slitting her wrists- when Marina Krim, the children's mother, entered the apartment.
The mother, Marina Krim, 36, arrived at her West 75th Street home at 5:34 p.m. after Ortega, failed to meet her for swimming lessons with the kids she was watching. Marina was with her third child, a 3-year-old daughter named Nessie, The building's doorman told Krim the nanny hadn't left, and she went upstairs to find the reason for the hold-up. Marina's screams prompted neighbors to call the police.
"We believe now that the nanny began stabbing herself ... as the mother entered the bathroom," New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told reporters at a news conference Friday. Ortega, a naturalized American citizen from the Dominican Republic, has not been formally charged. In police custody, she remains hospitalized in a medically induced coma for her knife wounds, according to Kelly.
Krim's husband is Kevin Krim, a senior vice president and general manager of CNBC Digital. Kevin Krim, had been on a business trip and was met by police at the airport when he returned to New York. Officers recounted the horror to him and he was escorted to the hospital. A makeshift memorial has been set up outside the apartment.
Related: Mother Mariana Krim Finds Two Children Stabbed in Bath Tub By Nanny in New York
