ACCORDING to the New York Times, Yoselyn Ortega, the Dominican nanny who slashed two children to death in Manhattan two weeks ago, told police detectives Saturday that she resented the Krims. This is in keeping with a previous post here that questioned whether she was motivated by envy. William K. Raushbaum reports:

The nanny charged with stabbing to death two children she cared for on the Upper West Side of Manhattan told detectives that she had resentment toward the family, who she complained were always telling her what to do, a law enforcement official said this week.

The nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, was interviewed in her hospital bed on Saturday by detectives at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, the police have said.

Ms. Ortega was charged hours later with fatally stabbing the children, Lucia Krim, 6, and Leo Krim, 2, in a bathroom in the family’s apartment last month shortly before their mother, Marina Krim, returned from a swimming lesson with her other young daughter.

Ms. Ortega waived her right to have a lawyer present during questioning, the official said, although she did not confess to the killings.

She told the detectives, “Marina knows what happened,” the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case, said Sunday.

The police have said that Ms. Krim walked into the bathroom to find Ms. Ortega stabbing herself in the throat, with the dying children bleeding in the bathtub.

The official said that Ms. Ortega was not medicated but that she seemed “spacey.”

The official said that while the Krim family did not have problems with Ms. Ortega and seemed to live an idyllic life, Ms. Ortega, based on what she told the investigators, had a different view.

—– Comments —–

Terry Morris writes:

My God! I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around what was going on in Ortega’s head. And her statements to police raise the additional question of whether she and Mrs. Krim may have had some kind of an argument prior to Mrs. Krim’s taking her daughter to her swimming lesson; an argument or disagreement that was the “last straw” for Ortega.

Jane S. writes:

You pointed out, rightly, that the Krims should not be blamed for hiring Ortega as a nanny. It is difficult to diagnose someone’s mental illness unless you are a trained professional, and even they don’t always agree.

At the same time, it is not possible for someone to be psychotic enough to murder children, but normal in every other way. Not possible. It reveals itself in a person’s behavior or thought content; it always does, it did for Ortega and people ignored it.

They made good points on the subject at VFR, too. Lawrence Auster wrote:

I think that Marina Krim was so transported by the wonderfulness of her life that she was blinded to reality.

Think of her blog. . . The joy Mrs. Krim took in her children at her blog is a delightful thing to behold. But was it appropriate to effuse about her fantastic children, about her personal happiness and fulfillment, on a public web page? Isn’t there something boastful in that, even a kind of hubris? And hubris comes before a fall.”

So much of wrong-headed liberal thinking is based on the same wrong-headed liberal assumption: that everyone simply must love them as much as they love themselves.  It is arrogant to bang on about how wonderful and awesome your life is, especially you are extraordinarily well-to-do. Of course your life is wonderful and awesome: you can afford an $11,000-a-month apartment in one of the toniest neighborhoods in the world. Do they have any idea how obnoxious that makes them appear to some people? Afraid not.

Laura writes:

They obviously missed signs of Ortega’s malice and maybe it was because they lived in an unreal, fairy tale world. However, I don’t find much evidence that the Krims were so full of themselves. By the standards of Mommy blogs, Marina Krim’s blog was modest, and it was probably meant exclusively for family and friends as a way of keeping them up on details of the children’s lives. Many women are enchanted with their young children. Was she so happy that she failed to see that her nanny might slash her son’s throat? Then may many others live in a fairy tale world where they cannot imagine such evil and where they are so trusting that they fail to interpret the strange moods of a nanny as homicidal hatred. I agree that they violated the barriers that should exist between employers and a nanny, and that this was likely exacerbated by white guilt, but I just can’t rush to any conclusions as to why they failed to see how dangerous she was.

Lawrence Auster writes:

You quote a New York Times article which speaks of Yoselyn Ortega’s “resentment” toward the Krims. Terry Morris wonders if there was an argument between Ortega and Marina Krim.

Indeed there was. See the Daily Mail article which I have just posted at VFR under the title:

Marina Krim and the killer nanny had “epic argument” the day before the murders

Laura writes:

The Daily Mail account removes any doubt as to whether the Krims were oblivious. They were concerned about Ortega and had come close to giving her notice. Ortega, if this account is true, killed the children out of anger and revenge.

Perhaps they could have done nothing to prevent this once they had alienated Ortega. Even if they had fired her, she might have found a way to get at the children.

Laura adds:

According to the Daily Mail account, the mother had a “vicious argument” with Ortega the day before. One wonders why she let Ortega back in their home.

By the way, it is interesting that once again the Daily Mail has done a much better reporting job than an American newspaper.

Buck writes [before the Daily Mail account was posted]:

My instinctive thought, upon first reading about the circumstances of the murders, was that Yoselyn Ortega resented the Krims, and that the Krims were negligent in and by their ignorance and by their self-enforced denial and an active defiance of a natural order of being. We’re forever being conditioned to reject and deny our own good and natural instincts, the very instincts that protect us and our children. Isn’t this what we routinely discuss, the over-arching, insidious power that modern liberalism increasing wields even over our rapidly diminishing common sense? I can’t know this, but I believe that mother Krim had to be conflicted and that she had to at least feel and sense that something was wrong, and that her own two young children were less safe than she knew was necessary and that she truly desired. These were the two young children not long ago born to her. Was she so otherwise preoccupied or self-absorbed that she lost touch with her own children and in her own home? Or was she contemptuous of her own feelings and dutifully rejecting them? She may have been conscious of Yoselyn Ortega’s resentment, as she well should have been, but her instincts were short-circuited by her internal conflict and her self-imposed denial. If not; if she felt nothing, sensed nothing, then where was her natural and protective motherly instincts? Is there no such thing? Did her modern liberal sensibilities override her motherly instincts, even though they were working? Because if they weren’t working, and she wasn’t confused or conflicted, then there isn’t even that to mitigate what could be deemed the actual negligence of a routinely inattentive mother.

I know that’s a mouthful of harsh speculation, but to me it perfectly aligns with much of what we seem to be saying about our modern liberal disease.

My early speculation: “Is it possible that the relationship between an obtuse liberal well-to-do Upper West Side family and a servant who is far away from her own home and family was harboring a growing resentment? She would have had to have very strong character and a healthy sense of self and her place and probably a healthy faith not to be seriously bothered by her status within this prosperous and perfect New York family.”

[The discussion continues here.]

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