A woman suspected of murdering her three children in bitter custody said she drowned them to keep them away from their father, a California television station reported.
In an interview in prison, Liliana Carrillo, 30, told KGET-TV on Thursday that she wanted to “protect” them from abuse.
“I drowned them … I didn’t want them to continue abusing them,” said Carrillo, who was interviewed on remand in Lerdo in Kern County. “When they were born, I promised to protect them,” he added.
“I hugged and kissed them and constantly apologized,” he said. “I loved my kids.”
“I wish my kids were still alive, yes,” he said. ‘Wish you didn’t have to? Yes. But I preferred that they were not regularly tortured and abused for the rest of their lives. “
Carrillo, wearing a brown prison uniform, had his arms tied around his waist. He had a cast or bandage on his left arm. He cried several times during the nearly half-hour interview.
Carrillo’s children, 3-year-old Joanna Denton Carrillo, her 2-year-old brother Terry and her 6-month-old sister, Sierra, were found dead on Saturday by their maternal grandmother in her apartment in the Reseda neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was arrested later that day in Tulare County, nearly 200 miles north of the crime scene.
In the interview, Carrillo said she drove north with the intention of looking for a cliff and killing herself, but the car got stuck in a ditch and instead took the vehicle of some of the people who had stopped for her. to assist.
However, the woman pleaded not guilty in a Kern County courtroom on Wednesday for four felonies related to attempted carjacking and carjacking.
Carrillo has not yet been charged with the deaths of her children, pending further investigation.