BAKERSFIELD, California (KABC) – A woman accused of killing her three young children in a Reseda apartment has admitted that they drowned with the intent to protect them from their father.
“I drowned them. I did it so gently … I do not know how to explain it, ‘Lilliana Carrillo said in a disturbing prison interview with KGET-TV on Thursday. “I hugged them. I kissed them. I apologized the whole time. I loved my children. ”
Carrillo told the Bakersfield television station that she killed the children aged 6 months, 2 and 3 years to protect them from their father, who she said was involved in human trafficking.
She said she wished her children were still alive, but added: “I prefer that they not be regularly tortured and abused for the rest of their lives.”
Carrillo identified the children as Joanna Maria, 3; Terry Joseph, 2; and Sierra Sequoia, 6 months.
“I love you and I’m sorry,” was the last thing Carrillo said to her son and daughters.
Erik Denton, Carrillo’s ex-boyfriend and the father of the children, applied to the court on March 1, claiming that Carrillo was misleading and took the children and refused to tell him where they were.
Carrillo, in turn, filed a restraining order against him, claiming Denton was an alcoholic who may have sexually abused their oldest child.
While the case was being handled by family courts in Tulare and Los Angeles counties, the parents traded accusations in dozens of pages of documents. Police were called, social workers were consulted, disturbing text messages and Facebook messages were stored as legal exhibits.
Last week, a judge in Los Angeles agreed to move the case to Tulare County, where a trial would take place on Wednesday.
It would be too late.
The victims’ grandmother found their bodies in an apartment in the 8000 block of Reseda Boulevard around 9:30 a.m. Saturday, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Carrillo was nowhere to be found.
She was identified as the suspected killer and was arrested hours later in Tulare County, nearly 200 kilometers north of the scene.
Criminal defense attorney Doug Ridley says Denton’s claims at trial that Carrillo suffered from post-partum depression, along with other mental health issues, is a likely strategy her lawyer will use to prove she is mentally unfit to to stand trial.
“It would really surprise me if she ended up in a psychiatric ward rather than go to jail for the rest of her life in a case like this,” Ridley said. ‘It’s so horrible and we do not even know all the details yet. We have one report that says the children were stabbed with a knife. And then we have another report that says they drowned, and the official report is that they are still trying to determine the cause of death. ‘
Ridley added that the confession of jail time in Carrillo is likely to weaken any legal motion proving she is unfit to stand trial.
‘She makes coherent sentences, so I believe the video will be proof that she’s capable, but then all the other mental health considerations go to a defense, whether it’s postpartum, or whether it’s a battered is women’s syndrome, or another mental defense, ‘he said.
Denton’s court documents tell of Carrillo’s depression after giving birth after the birth of their middle child. She starts therapy but stops. She has self-medication with marijuana, he claims. In texts and social media posts, she said things like “I wish I had never had children” and threatened to kill herself.
Psychiatrist Ananya Sreepathi says Carrillo claims she killed her children to protect them from their father, should he judge her for the most extreme case of post-partum depression and any mental health issues.
“Often, women in postpartum psychosis may have delusions about the baby or hallucinations, such as hearing voices saying they need to do certain things to harm the baby,” he said.