An Upper West Side nanny was found guilty Wednesday of killing two children in 2012, according to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance.
Yoselyn Ortega was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. The jury found her guilty of all four counts and she faces up to life in prison.
Ortega stabbed Leo Krim, 2, and his sister Lucia, 6, in their Upper West Side apartment on Oct. 25, 2012.
The children were found in a bathtub in the West 75th Street apartment.
The children’s mother was out with the couple’s third child at the time.
After attacking the children, Ortega, whose trial started last month, then stabbed herself in the neck.
Ortega’s defense attorneys asked the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity.
Following the verdict, Vance said, “cases like this are so difficult . . . [the Krims] lived through the worst nightmare any parent can endure.”
He added that prosecutors “are here to protect the most vulnerable among us, to speak for them when they cannot.”
The children’s’ father, Kevin Krim, commended the “courage and intelligence and dignity of New Yorkers” in a Facebook post late Wednesday night.
“These jurors went through hell,” he wrote. “I hugged every one of them I could.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, juror David Curtis said the panel was split until the end.
“We found that when we balanced the testimony of the experts on both sides, that we could not find a strongly credible proof that the defendant was not aware and able to recognize what was going on,” he said. “We were divided at the beginning, and we were divided until the moment we made the decision.”
Curtis, who has two grown children, said he worked hard not to be influenced by his feelings for his own kids.
“It is horrifying to think of being in a position of having to experience or go through the processes that the Krims had to go through,” Curtis said, calling the decision to render a guilty version a difficult one. “But I think it was also incumbent on all of us in the decision process to try to not put ourselves in those positions but to try to be separate.”
Ultimately, however, Curtis said the jury’s “heart goes out” to the Krims.
“I think every one of us individually could feel the heartbreak and the agony when they were on the stand testifying,” he said.
