After years of waiting, the nanny charged with brutally murdering two tots in the bathtub of their Upper West Side apartment is finally headed to trial.
Jury selection is expected to kick off today for alleged child murderer Yoselyn Ortega, who stands accused of butchering siblings Leo Krim, 2, and Lucia Krim, 6, in Oct. 2012.
Judge Gregory Carro, who will oversee the trial, last year offered Ortega a plea deal in which she would have gotten 30 years to life behind bars in exchange for pleading guilty to two counts of murder.
The 56-year-old nanny tuned down the deal, even though she admitted to the slaying during a series of hospital interviews given as she recuperated from slitting her own throat and slashing her wrists.
Ortega tried to kill herself near the children’s remains as mother Marina Krim walked into the W. 75th Street apartment with her third child, now 7-years-old, in tow.
Krim had returned to the apartment when the nanny failed to meet her with the children for swimming and dance lessons, cops said at the time.
“You don’t know what they put me through,” the woman allegedly told officers during questioning, though her defense team has argued she was too drugged up and delirious to have understood what she was saying.
“She admits she did hurt the children,” former Manhattan prosecutor Gregory Beneduct LeDonne testified during hearings last summer. “She used two knives, I think once on the boy and more than twice on the girl and that she was mad at the mom.”
“She expressed numerous grievances and petty slights she had suffered,” he added.
Ortega has been found variously fit and unfit to stand trial in the nearly 6 years since the slaying.
The children’s parents, Kevin and Marina Krim, have been notably absent from Ortega’s court appearances. They welcomed a baby boy in Oct. 2014.
In March 2017, Marina Krim penned an essay in which she said her butchered children send her “messages” to help her deal with her grief.
If convicted of the top count, Ortega faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Judge Gregory Carro, who will oversee the trial, last year offered Ortega a plea deal that would have gifted her the minimum of 30 years to life behind bars–in exchange for pleading guilty to two counts of murder.
She refused.