6,830,000 pageviews


Monday, April 4, 2022

The Yoselyn Ortega Murder Case

      Kevin Krim grew up in Thousand Oaks, California where he was a high school football star. The Harvard graduate met his future wife Marina at an Italian restaurant in Venice Beach. They were married in 2003. Marina had grown up in Manhattan Beach, California. Kevin worked in Los Angeles then took a job with Yahoo in San Francisco. The couple moved to New York City in 2009.

     In October 2012, the Krims, with three children--Lucia, age 6, Nessie, 3, and 2-year-old Leo, lived on Manhattan's upper west side in a second-floor, 3-bedroom apartment in the LaRochelle Building on West 75th Street. The $10,000 a month apartment is a block from Central Park and not far from the Museum of Natural History and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Marina, a stay-at-home mother, kept a daily online journal of her children's daily lives.

     In October 2010 the Krims had hired 48-year-old Yoselyn Ortega, a nanny who had been referred to them by Ortega's older sister Celia who, as a nanny herself, met Marina and Lucia at a ballet lesson. A naturalized U.S. citizen from the Dominican Republic, Yoselyn lived in Manhattan's Hamilton Heights neighborhood then moved to an apartment on Riverside Drive in Harlem a few miles from the Krims. She lived with her son, sister, and niece.

     The Krims became very close to Ortega (they called her "Yosi"), and in February 2012, accompanied her to the Dominican Republic where they visited her family. Whenever the Krims left town for an extended period with their children, they bought Ortega a flight back to her native country. According to the nanny's relatives, she had been seeing a psychologist and had financial problems. For extra money, she had been selling cheap cosmetics and jewelry to residents of her tenement building.

     On Thursday afternoon on October 25, 2012, Marina took 3-year-old Nessie to a swimming lesson. She left Leo and Lucia in the apartment with the nanny. At 5:25 that evening, when Marina and Nessie returned to the apartment, they found the place dark. Marina assumed that Yoselyn Ortega had taken the two children out for a walk.

     Marina Krim and her daughter Nessie returned to the lobby and from the doorman learned that Yoselyn Ortega and the children had not left the building. Marina re-entered the apartment and when she walked into the bathroom saw Leo and Lucia lying in the bathtub covered in blood. The children had been slashed and stabbed to death with the bloody kitchen knife lying on the floor next to the nanny who was bleeding from a wound in her neck. Yoselyn Ortega had also slashed her wrists.

     Several neighbors heard Marina scream, "You slit her throat!" Later the distraught mother was heard saying, "What am I going to do with the rest of my life? I have no children."

     Paramedics rushed the unconscious nanny to the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Medical Center where she underwent emergency surgery. Marina was taken to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital for sedation. Kevin Krim, returning from a business trip to San Francisco, was met at the airport with the news of his children's deaths. He was also taken to the hospital where they sedated him.

     On Friday, October 26, 2012, detectives were unable to question Ortega who was on a respirator. According to the doctors, the nanny was expected to survive her wounds. Investigators believed Ortega murdered the children, then stabbed herself in the neck about the time the victims' mother entered the apartment.

     Yoselyn Ortega was the youngest of six siblings who grew up in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. Her sister Celia emigrated to the United States in the early 1980s after graduating from accounting studies at Santa Ana College in Santiago. Yoselyn later joined her older sister in America. She worked as the manager of a print shop in Manhattan, then after separating from the father of her son, returned to the Dominican Republic. After awhile, she returned to New York City. According to family members she loved the Krim children. Before the murders she had been acting strangely from some kind of emotional stress.

     Prior to her hospital bed arraignment on November 28, 2012, Yoselyn Ortega's attorney asked the judge to bar the press from the hearing on the grounds his client was too "pathetic" to be seen. Judge Lewis Stone denied the request.

     In a June 2013 Rikers Island jail interview of Ortega by a reporter with the New York Daily News, the murder suspect denied killing the children. "I didn't do that," she said. "Those are all lies." The brief interview ended abruptly when Ortega said, "My lawyer told me not to talk. I'm not supposed to say anything."  Later that month, a Manhattan judge at Ortega's competency hearing ruled that she was mentally fit for trial. Ortega's attorney, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, appealed that decision.

     In August 2013, before the same Manhattan judge, prosecution witness Dr. Ankur Saraiya took the stand and said that while Ortega "had suffered some brain damage when she slit her throat, the injury was not enough to interfere with her fitness." The judge reaffirmed his initial finding that this defendant was mentally competent to stand trial.

     In April 2018, after dozens of delays, a jury sitting in New York City rejected Ortega's insanity defense and found her guilty of double murder. The judge sentenced her to life in prison.

1 comment:

  1. What am I going to do for the rest of my life, I have no children? She HAS another child. I just think that is a weird thing to say and I don't get why she said that-even in shock-makes me wonder if those kids are adopted.

    ReplyDelete