In emotional testimony Wednesday, a nanny recalled the tragic moment she learned the mother of the kids she cared for had been found dead.

When Hyacynth Reid arrived for work at the Dorchester Towers Dec. 31, 2009, she found cops swarming victim Shele Danishefsky’s apartment.

“I asked three times, ‘Where is Shele?’ and Rod is the one who answered,” she testified at the murder trial of Danishefsky’s estranged hubby, Rod Covlin, who’s accused of snapping his wife’s neck.

A detached Covlin, who lived across the hall, was sitting on Danishefky’s sofa and told Reid that she had “an accident in the bathroom” and was dead.

He and Danishefsky were in the midst of a contentious divorce, and she had an order of protection against him.

“I was shocked and stunned,” she recalled. “I had a coffee that I bought at McDonald’s and it fell out of my hand right there. I just fell to the carpet screaming and crying.”

She said that as she crumpled to the floor, she was yelling, “No! No! She did not have an accident!”

Danishefsky was found just an hour earlier face-down in the bathtub by her 9-year-old daughter. Her 3-year-old son was asleep.

The previous day when Reid dropped off the children with Covlin for their supervised visit, he asked her a strange question. He wanted to know whether she planned to sleep at Danishefsky’s apartment that night. He had never asked this before, she told jurors in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Just a few months earlier, on May 12, the nanny, who’d cared for the children since they were born, had jotted down an eerily prescient note.

A distraught Danishefsky told her that she and Covlin had a fight, and he said that if she tried to take the kids, he’d “get rid of her permanently.”

Reid promptly wrote the ominous threat down and dated it but couldn’t recall the exact words on the stand. Justice Ruth Pickholz barred jurors from hearing the note’s contents.

Prosecutors say that Covlin murdered his wife and made it look like a slip and fall to reap her $5.2 million fortune.