Just two weeks before she allegedly stabbed to death little Lucia and Leo Krim, their nanny was spiraling into madness and insisting something was “inside” her sister testified Tuesday.
“She would get up at dawn, and she would take the pots and pans and throw them around the room,” Delci Ortega said of her sister, Yoselyn Ortega.
“And she would say, ‘sister, sister, pray for me. I have something, I have something inside me.”
The alleged slide into madness began around Oct. 12, 2012, Delci Ortega testified — just two weeks before the 55-year-old would carve up her 6- and 2-year-old charges in the bathtub of their Upper West Side apartment on Oct. 25.
Ortega claims she was “touched by the devil,” when she the killed the kids, who she’d been under her care for nearly two years.
Their father, Kevin Krim, sat in the courtroom for the second day in a row Tuesday.
Delci Ortega, 60, said Tuesday her sister would also black out during strange times, such as while the two were praying in church.
“She would forget where she was, and I would say, ‘you’re in church, sister,’” the sibling told jurors, mentioning Ortega repeatedly referenced seeing a “black man,” in her presence who wasn’t there.
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and she said ‘I hear a voice, I hear a voice.’ She was transformed, she wasn’t herself.”
“Who is the black man?” defense attorney Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg asked.
“Satan — the bad one,” Delci Ortega replied. She later admitted that was a guess, and her answer was stricken from the record.
In the 12 days before the murders, the nanny started papering her room with religious images, and lighting candles.
She also spoke of the Krim children frequently during those weeks, saying “she loved them very much,” Ortega’s older sister told jurors.
Prosecutors contend that the nanny was not possessed, but planned the slayings to get back at the children’s mother, Marina, over perceived petty slights.
The night before the killings, Ortega allegedly got up and complained of a headache. She seemed “very nervous,” Delci Ortega said. “She told me her head was aching badly, and she heard voices.”
The tot’s bloody and lifeless bodies were discovered just after 5 p.m. the next day by Marina, who walked into the bathroom as Ortega was stabbing herself in the throat, authorities have said.
The nanny, who is mounting an insanity defense, could be committed to a psychiatric facility for the foreseeable future if found not guilty by reason of insanity. If convicted of first-degree murder, she faces life behind bars.
