According to Mr. Kelly, the police commissioner, on the day of the killings, Ms. Krim had left Leo and Lucia with Ms. Ortega while she took her middle child, Nessie, 3, to a swimming lesson. He said that Ms. Krim had planned to meet the others at a dance studio after the swimming lesson.

They never showed up, he said.

Ms. Krim, worried, walked home to the apartment building where the family had lived for the last couple of years. When she arrived home around 5:30 p.m., she found a dark apartment, Mr. Kelly said after a briefing the night of the killings. She went to the lobby and asked the doorman if he had seen the nanny and her children. Told that they had not left the building, she returned to the apartment. She looked around in the quiet rooms. Finally, she turned on the lights in the bathroom — and saw her two children in the bathtub and Ms. Ortega plunging a knife into her own throat. When the police arrived minutes later, Ms. Ortega was unconscious.

Commissioner Kelly said that given the horror Ms. Krim had witnessed, it was difficult for her to communicate. Mr. Krim was traveling for business, and was told of the situation hours later, when he arrived in New York. He was met at the airport by the police, who told him what had happened and took him to see his wife at St. Luke’s Hospital.

The Krims’ neighbors said they had moved to New York from California in the last couple of years. Mr. Krim is an executive at CNBC and had previously worked at Bloomberg and Yahoo.

Ms. Krim had worked in California for a wholesaler of powders made from exotic fruits, like acai berries and pomegranates, according to her LinkedIn profile. A neighbor said that in New York, Ms. Krim largely devoted her time to her children.

Everything Looked Normal

The day of the killings, Charlotte Friedman, who lives on the seventh floor of the Krims’ building, said she saw the nanny and the two children in the elevator at about 5 p.m. Everything looked normal, she said: The girl was friendly, as she usually was, and the nanny said nothing.

“I never saw her as a warm nanny,” Ms. Friedman said.

A law enforcement official said nothing in Ms. Ortega’s background had pointed to anything like what happened.“No fighting with the mom, the family, the kids,” the official said. “We’ve got nothing bad other than the fact that she killed two children.”

Autopsies showed that said Lucia had died from “multiple stab and incise wounds” — cuts that typically cause rapid bleeding — and her brother of “incise wounds of the neck,” according to a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office.

Hints of Trouble

Ms. Ortega’s friend Maria Lajara lived two floors above Ms. Ortega’s sister’s apartment. Ms. Lajara remembered the day last spring when Ms. Ortega stopped by and asked her to pray that she would find a new apartment where she could live with her teenage son. Soon, Ms. Lajara said, “she knocked on my door, she was so happy. She said, ‘’I got the apartment! I came to say goodbye.’” The new apartment was in the Bronx, and they kept in touch after she moved.

Ms. Lajara also said Ms. Ortiz had talked about how happy she was with her work life. Ms. Lajara said Ms. Ortiz had told her that she loved her job with the Krims. She told Ms. Lajara that she was paid well and treated well.

“She really loved them, the family,” Ms. Lajara said. “She loved the kids, she would take them to the park, and she said the mom was a really good person.”

But Ms. Ortega also hinted at financial troubles. Another neighbor said she had been selling jewelry and makeup to make some extra money. Twice she asked Ms. Lajara to pray that a woman who owed her a considerable amount would pay her. Ms. Lajara said Ms. Ortega had given another woman some makeup to peddle, and the woman had not come through with the money. Ms. Ortega said the woman “owed her a lot of money,” Ms. Lajhara said.

In the last few weeks, Ms. Ortega moved back to her sister’s crowded apartment at 610 Riverside Drive. She had lost the Bronx apartment.

The superintendent at the Riverside Drive building, Fernando Mercado, said that she had rented the Bronx apartment from an acquaintance who moved to the Dominican Republic. But the apartment was never in Ms. Ortega’s name, and the tenant apparently returned and threw Ms. Ortega out.

Another neighbor, Ruben Rivas, 49, described her as “kind of devastated,” and others said she had seemed nervous lately, and tired. Kenia Galo, 25, said she had mentioned it when she saw Ms. Ortega in the elevator of the Riverside Drive building.

“‘I am tired,’ she would say. ‘Work,’” Ms. Galo recalled.

Nanny, Still in Hospital, Pleads Not Guilty in 2 Fatal Stabbings

By Russ Buettner - The New York Times

November 28, 2012

The nanny charged with fatally stabbing two children she cared for on the Upper West Side of Manhattan pleaded not guilty to murder charges on Wednesday from her hospital bed.

The nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, has been hospitalized at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center since the evening of Oct. 25, when the children were found dead in a luxury apartment building a block from Central Park.

Ms. Ortega’s hands were handcuffed under a white blanket and her hair pulled under a blue hairnet, according to a pool report by The Associated Press, the only news organization allowed to witness the 10-minute proceeding.

Her lawyer, Valerie Leer-Greenberg, entered the plea on Ms. Ortega’s behalf. The police charged Ms. Ortega with first-degree murder on Nov. 3, delaying the charges because she was intubated and unable to speak as she received treatment for self-inflicted knife wounds to her throat and wrists.

On Wednesday, Ms. Ortega was wearing a neck brace and still had part of the apparatus of a tracheotomy in her throat. She did not speak, though a Spanish interpreter described the proceeding to her. Her lawyer told the judge that she was still too frail to be discharged from the hospital.

“She is in a very debilitated condition,” Ms. Leer-Greenberg said.

Judge Stone ordered that Ms. Ortega be held without bail and undergo a psychiatric evaluation as to her competency to stand trial. He also ordered that she be placed on suicide watch.

The police have said that the children’s mother, Marina Krim, returned home from a swimming lesson last month with her 3-year-old daughter to find Ms. Ortega in the bathroom stabbing herself in the throat and Ms. Krim’s other two children — Lucia Krim, 6, and Leo Krim, 2 — in the bathtub dying from knife wounds.

“This crime shocked and horrified parents around the city, many of whom entrust their children to the care of others both by necessity and by choice,” said Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney.

Relatives of the Krims said they had treated Ms. Ortega as a member of their family and would even pay for her to travel to the Dominican Republic so Ms. Ortega could visit her family while the Krims went on vacation.

But Ms. Ortega told detectives that she resented how the parents always told her what to do, a law enforcement official said this month. Relatives and friends of Ms. Ortega have said that they had seen signs of her unraveling lately, and that she had sought help from a mental health professional.

Upper West Side Nanny Is Charged With Murder in 2 Children’s Deaths

By Michael Schwirtz - The New York Times

November 3, 2012

A nanny accused of killing the two young children she was caring for on Oct. 25 in their Upper West Side apartment was charged on Saturday night with first-degree murder, the police said.

The nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, was charged with fatally stabbing the children, Lucia Krim, 6, and her brother, Leo, 2, shortly before their mother, Marina Krim, returned from a swimming lesson with her other young daughter.

The police said they had delayed charging Ms. Ortega for more than a week because she was intubated and unable to speak as doctors treated wounds she received when she stabbed herself in the throat and slashed her wrists.

Ms. Ortega talked with New York City detectives on Saturday afternoon from her bed at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she remains under police guard, Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said in a statement.

Mr. Browne gave no details about Ms. Ortega’s condition nor any indication of when she would leave the hospital.

He also declined to give information about a possible motive.

On the day of the killing, Ms. Krim returned home in the early evening with her 3-year-old daughter to find her two other children dead of knife wounds in the bathtub. As Ms. Krim walked into the bathroom, police said, Ms. Ortega plunged a kitchen knife into her own throat.

Ms. Ortega, who police said was a naturalized American citizen from the Dominican Republic, had been referred to the Krims by a family friend and had worked for them for about two years. Police said there was no record of her having committed a previous crime or any indication that there were tensions between her and the Krims.

But relatives and friends of Ms. Ortega have said that she seemed to have been unraveling lately and had sought help from a mental health professional. Her home, which she shared with several relatives including her teenage son, was crowded, and she had financial difficulties.

'I'm paid to watch the children, not to clean': Manhattan 'killer' nanny tells police she was angry at family because they asked her to do housework

DailyMail.co.uk

November 2, 2012

The nanny accused of stabbing two young children to death at their home before slitting her own throat told police when she woke up from her coma that she was angry because the family wanted her to clean as well as look after the children.

Dominican Republic native Yoselyn Ortega was questioned by police after allegedly butchered six-year-old Lucia and two-year-old Leo while they were under her care at an Upper West Side, Manhattan, apartment last week.

Law enforcement officials told the New York Post that Mr and Mrs Krim asked their financially-strapped nanny to do simple housework as a way to earn money, thinking they were doing her a good turn. All this did was enrage her.

She said something like, "I'm paid to watch the children, not clean up and do housework",' a law-enforcement source said of Yoselyn Ortega’s statements to police after she woke up from a medically-induced coma on Sunday.

'There was friction between her and the family.'

In Ortega's brief statement to police, she said her employers had arranged to give her an extra five hours a week in housekeeping work to help her make more money, law-enforcement sources told the Post.

'They were asking her to clean and do housework and she was unhappy because it interfered with her doctor's appointments.'

It was also revealed today that Marina and Kevin Krim were worried about Ortega's job performance in the weeks leading up to the October 25 slaying and had told her that if she didn't improve her job performance they might need to replace her.

A law-enforcement source told the Post: 'She was told that if she didn't improve her work, she would be let go.'

Last week, the mother of CNBC executive Kevin Krim said that the young family treated Ortega, as they would one of their own, 'bending over backwards' to help her and even buying plane tickets so she could fly to the Dominican Republic with them.

Ortega allegedly repaid this kindness by murdering her children before trying to kill herself. Marina Krim discovered her son and daughter, Leo and Lulu, in a pool of blood in a bathtub, each with multiple stab wounds.

She was due to meet Ortega and her other two children at the local swimming pool with her now only surviving child Nessie, three. But when they failed to show up, she returned to her three-bedroom, $10,000-a-month pre-war apartment at West 75th Street and found it dark, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

When she went into the bedroom, she discovered her children in a pool of blood and a bleeding Ortega.

The nanny, who had slit her wrists, then plunged a kitchen knife into her own neck as the horrified mother walked into the grisly scene, police said. She stabbed herself with such force that she fractured a vertebra in her neck, police said.

Though she looked after the children for two years and was treated like part of the family, the 50-year-old did not ask about them when she woke from her coma, asking instead about her own family before falling back under sedation. Police plan on questioning her again. Charges have yet to be filed.

Ortega's sister Miladys said she spoke to her sister in the days leading up to the massacre and she gave her no indication anything was wrong.

But the nanny's neighbors said she appeared in troubled in the weeks leading up to the murders and she had been struggling with money issues - which is why the Krims offered her more work.

Ortega remains at nearby New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Toxicology tests performed on Ortega came back negative.

Neighbor Rima Starr, 63, recalls the moment she heard Mrs Krim make the grisly discovery.: 'I heard blood curdling screams and I went down to the lobby and there was the mother screaming, hunched over the three year old.

'At time she was screaming things like: "I'll never speak to her again", repeating that over and over again, then "it's all right, you'll be all right, you'll be alright" to the child.

'Then she would get waves of the reality of what just happened and then she'd go into just plain bloodcurdling screams with her arms flailing out to the sides.'

One neighbor revealed the superintendent of the apartment block went into the apartment and questioned Ortega, demanding: 'So you cut her throat? So you stabbed her in the neck?'

His wife then came out to assist and told horrified neighbours who had heard the screams: 'Two babies, in the bath, nanny' and made a cutting sign across her throat.

Mrs Friedman added: 'At that point I knew the nanny had something to do with it'.

Neighbours dialed 911 and, although Lulu and Leo reportedly appeared to be breathing when medics arrived, they were pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

Ortega was unresponsive but was taken to New York-Cornell Hospital in a critical but stable condition. She was in a stable condition on Friday morning and police sources say she may have also taken pills.

Mrs Krim and Nessie, who had not witnessed the grisly scene, were also taken to hospital for treatment, and Mrs Krim was sedated.

A neighbour told the Wall Street Journal the woman had left the building 'inconsolable, hysterical, frantic'.

Her husband, Kevin Krim, had been on a business trip and was met by police at the airport when he returned to New York. Officers recounted the horror to him and he was escorted to the hospital.

Mr and Mrs Krim remained at St. Luke's hospital last night with Mrs Krim's sister. Police said the shocked mother was unable to communicate.

On Friday, neighbour Charlotte Friedman said she believes she was the last one to see the children alive and that the nanny had looked 'cold' just half an hour before the murders.

She said that she was in the elevator with Ortega, who had a 'poker face' and appeared unemotional despite Lulu and Leo playing around.

'I was playing with the children in the elevator,' Friedman said. 'The girl looked so delightful. I asked her if she was going on a play date or something and she said she was going home.

'I said, "What did you do," and she said, "Dancing." And that was it - they were only on the second floor so they left.

'She was smiling, happy, happy happy. The nanny just smiled - and nothing. The nanny was a colder type from most nannies that I have encountered.

'She was poker faced. She wasn't the warmest person. I never saw her as the warmest nanny.'

Ortega's niece, Katherine Garcia, added that her aunt had been 'acting kind of nervous lately' but insisted that she had loved the children.

Friends said she had lost her apartment in the Bronx and was forced to move in her sister in Harlem. Police added that her family said she may have visited a psychologist recently.

Police said there were no immediate explanations for the murders and suicide attempt. Paul J. Browne, from the police department, told the New York Times he did not know a note had been left.

The family had moved to New York from San Francisco within the last few years, and Mr Krim was named general manager of CNBC's digital media division in March.

He is a Harvard graduate and has recently worked at Bloomberg and Yahoo, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The children's grandmother on their father's side, Karen Krim, told said that the family hired Ortega a year ago, until which time Mrs Krim had been a stay-at-home mother.

When Leo was born, they searched for a nanny. They even spent nine days with her family in the Dominican Republic, as documented on Mrs Krim's online journal.

'They just bent over backwards being nice to this woman,' Karen Kim told the New York Daily News. 'They were always doing things that were just fabulous for her. I’m just astounded, and I have no idea why something like this would happen.'

She added: 'We’re just having a really, really hard time here. It’s the worst nightmare any parent could ever have.'

Mrs Krim, who teaches weekly art lessons to children, kept an online journal entitled 'Life with the Krim Kids', which she had last updated just three hours before the murders.

She had written: 'Leo speaks in the most adorable way possible.'

The online journal paints a tender picture of her life with her husband and their beloved children, and gives an insight into the horrendous loss that has befallen the family.

She documents trips to pick apples, visits to pumpkin patches and playdates. Photographs show the children playing happily together around the home and on their first days of school.

'One of the best parts of my day is after I drop both girls off at school and have 3 precious hours with little Lito all to myself,' she wrote. 'Ok, I’m near getting cheesy I adore this boy so much!!!'

She added how he loved to play with toy cars and trucks, and would set up his own 'kitchen' in the living room where he would pretend to make bacon.

'Lito, I must say, is a very clever little boy,' she wrote. 'He is super talkative and just has a million thoughts running through his brain and can express himself amazingly well for an almost-2 year old. I'm thinking he could be a Mini-Kevin.'

The family lives in one of the city's most idyllic neighborhoods, just a block from Central Park and a few more from the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

It is home to many affluent families, and seeing children accompanied by nannies is an everyday part of life there, making the idea of such violence even more disturbing to residents.

Mrs Friedman added that the Krims are a quiet, nice friendly' family.

She said: 'They were sweet people. They had two large dogs they used to walk, they were greyhounds I think. The children were full of life.'

All morning a steady stream of passers by stopped off at the apartment block to lay flowers, some of whom were in tears.

Among the tributes was a card on some flowers which read: 'Dear Krim Family. We weep with you at your horrible loss. There are no words that can express our sadness. We pray for you and your beautiful children.

'Every mother and father weeps with you and your family during this dark time'.

Police officers could be seen taking bags of evidence out of the building and at one point removed what appeared to be a long piece of wood which was about 12ft long.

'LIFE WITH THE KRIM KIDS': DOCUMENTING A HAPPY FAMILY

Marina Krim's online journal, Life with the Krim Kids, paints a tender picture of life with her husband and their children - and gives an insight into the horrendous loss that has befallen the family.

Consisting of mostly photographs, the blog documents trips to pick apples, visits to pumpkin patches and playdates. Images show the children playing happily together around the home, on their first days of school and at ballet recitals.

'One of the best parts of my day is after I drop both girls off at school and have 3 precious hours with little Lito all to myself,' she wrote. 'Ok, I'm near getting cheesy I adore this boy so much!!!'

'Lito, I must say, is a very clever little boy. He is super talkative and just has a million thoughts running through his brain and can express himself amazingly well for an almost-2 year old. I'm thinking he could be a Mini-Kevin.'

Hours before his death, she wrote: 'Leo speaks in the most adorable way possible.'

Of her eldest daughter Lulu, who was also killed on Thursday, she joked: 'Lulu is in love. His name is Joakim, he's 1/2 British, 1/2 Swedish. He lives in our apartment building and speaks with a British accent, is a total hipster and we love his parents. She gets totally giddy around him. Not sure Lulu knows this but Joakim has 2 other girlfriends as well...'

She later added: 'Lulu has another boyfriend -- When I picked her up from school yesterday, she told me that Martin (pronounced 'Mar-teen', he's half-french, half-peruvian) is her boyfriend and her valentine. Apparently, she kissed him twice.'

Last year, she wrote: 'When I ask Lulu what she wants to be when she grows up, she always says she wants to be a Mama. And she is going to be a really good one.'

In February, she added photos from the family's trip to the Dominican Republic, where they saw the family of their nanny.

'It was wonderful,' she wrote. 'And we met Josie's amazing family! The Dominican Republic is a wonderful country!!

Motive in Killings of 2 Children Remains a Mystery

By James Barron and Wendy Ruderman - The New York Times

October 27, 2012

A horrified mother walked into her Upper West Side apartment on Thursday to see the family’s nanny stabbing herself with the same bloody kitchen knife that she had already used on two of the woman’s young children, who lay dead in a bathtub, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Friday.

Mr. Kelly said the mother, Marina Krim, had left the two children — a 2-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl — with the nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, while Ms. Krim took her middle child, a 3-year-old girl, to a swimming lesson. He said Ms. Ortega was supposed to meet Ms. Krim and the 3-year-old at a dance studio after the swimming lesson.

They never showed up, he said.

Ms. Krim, worried, walked home to the ornate prewar building where the family had lived for the last couple of years and found a scene of almost unimaginable horror.

Mr. Kelly said detectives had been unable to question Ms. Ortega, who was in critical condition at a hospital.

Friends said Ms. Ortega had apparently had an up-and-down year, getting and losing an apartment in the Bronx and being forced to move back with her sister on Riverside Drive in Harlem. They said she had changed for the worse, looking harried, gaunt and older in recent months. Some said the once-gregarious woman who greeted people warmly, with “Hola, vecina!” — “Hello, neighbor!” — now spoke little and seemed to avoid eye contact. One friend said she had also run into financial problems, even though the Krims paid her well.

Mr. Kelly said Ms. Ortega’s family had told the police that she may have visited a psychologist recently or had been considering doing so.

But exactly what prompted her to attack the children — children who, by her friends’ accounts, she was devoted to — remained a mystery on Friday as passers-by added to a memorial outside the Krims’ building, at 57 West 75th Street.

Two small children who appeared to be about the same ages as the two Krim children laid stuffed animals — a turtle and a dog — beside the flowers and candles that others had placed outside the building. Their mother watched.

Another woman who stopped in front of the building was Rachel Cedar, 35. She said her first thought when she woke up on Friday was that her two boys, ages 3 and 5, “are safe in bed.”

“This poor mother is just like me,” Ms. Cedar said with tears in her eyes. “I have a baby sitter who I adore and trust her implicitly. She’s like a sister to me.”

She shared more thoughts about having a nanny: “It’s the ultimate act of trust. You have to rely on other people. It’s hard to raise kids in New York.” She called what had happened in the apartment on the second floor “a betrayal.”

The children’s grandfather, too, was at a loss to explain what would have prompted such an attack.

“They were very good to her,” Mr. Krim’s father, William Krim, 74, said. “We’re just the most stunned people in the world — I mean, they treated this woman so well.”

He said the children had been “the loves of our lives.”

‘It’s Just a Tragedy’

The police identified the children as Nessie, the 3-year-old who lived; the 6-year-old, Lucia, who was known as Lulu; and 2-year-old Leo. Ms. Krim wrote a blog where she documented “life with the little Krim kids” and showed them in photos around New York City, eating Gray’s Papaya hot dogs, pretending to use a pay phone, napping on the sofa and picking pumpkins. Lulu had been discovered by a talent agent and had done some modeling as a baby in California, the parents carefully saving the fees she earned with an eye toward college. Leo was said to be sweet, smart and easygoing.

“It’s just a tragedy,” William Krim said. “You couldn’t find more beautiful or better kids than they were."

Lulu, he said, was invited to a birthday party almost every week. “Kevin would laugh, ‘I can’t have a social life, I’m always taking Lulu to birthday parties,’ ” William Krim said. “They just doted on their kids — they would always take them with them. Everywhere they went, they brought the kids.” He said he had put his daughter-in-law’s number in his cellphone under the name “World’s Best Mom."

Mr. Krim said his son and daughter-in-law — who he said taught a class at the American Museum of Natural History near their apartment — had hired Ms. Ortega a couple of years ago. When the family went on vacation, he said, they paid for a ticket for Ms. Ortega to fly to the Dominican Republic to see her relatives there. Once they went there with her because, he said, the nanny wanted them to meet her own family.

Officials at Public School 87, where the 6-year-old was a first grader, sent an e-mail to parents that called the stabbings “a terrible tragedy.” The e-mail said a crisis management team would be at the school, three blocks from the Krims’ building, on Friday to “provide support to all children and adults” who needed it “during this terrible time.” One nanny, dropping off an 8-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl, said the school had canceled a field trip to a Broadway theater that had been scheduled for Friday.

And some parents said they were grappling with what to tell their children. William Davila, whose daughter Maya is a fifth grader, said he hoped she did not know the dead girl. He said that in thinking about what the parents were going through, “I don’t have words for something like that.”

It was a question that echoed through the neighborhood and across New York. Sara Park, who with her husband runs a dry-cleaning shop right across from the Krims’ building, shook her head in disbelief on Friday and asked: “What kind of person would do that?”

“It was a perfect, beautiful family,” she said.

Mr. Krim was a customer, she said, and Ms. Krim sometimes came in with the children. She recalled the day Ms. Krim brought the children in to have the boy’s tiny suit altered for a wedding they were going to. “He didn’t want to stand still,” she said. Ms. Krim gave him candy to try to induce cooperation — to no avail, Ms. Park said.

Updated Details From Police

The tragedy unfolded rapidly on Thursday afternoon. Mr. Kelly had said after a briefing that evening that when Ms. Krim returned around 5:30 p.m., she found a dark apartment. She went to the lobby and asked the doorman if he had seen the nanny and her children. Told that they had not left the building, she returned to the apartment. She looked around in the quiet rooms. Finally, she turned on the lights in the bathroom — and saw her two children in the bathtub. (Mr. Kelly said at the Thursday briefing that the nanny was unconscious on the floor. The police said they spoke with Ms. Krim later on and pieced together the more detailed account that he gave at the Friday briefing, when he said Ms. Krim witnessed the nanny stabbing herself when she turned on the bathroom light. The police said they found Ms. Ortega unconscious on the floor when they arrived minutes later.)

On Friday, Charlotte Friedman, who lives on the seventh floor of the Krims’ building, said she saw the nanny and the two children in the elevator around 5 p.m. on Thursday. Everything looked normal, she said: the girl was friendly, as she usually was, and the nanny said nothing.

“I never saw her as a warm nanny,” Ms. Friedman said.

Ms. Friedman said she asked the girl if she had gone on a play date. The girl said she had been dancing. “She looked delightful,” she said, describing her as “happy, happy, happy."

They got out on the second floor; Ms. Friedman rode on to her apartment to drop off some packages, and then went out again about 30 to 40 minutes later. “I heard screams from the elevator on my way out,” she said. In the lobby, she saw the mother holding the third child and realized it was Ms. Krim who had been screaming.

A law enforcement official said nothing in Ms. Ortega’s background had pointed to anything like what happened on Thursday.

“No fighting with the mom, the family, the kids,” the official said. “We’ve got nothing bad other than the fact that she killed two children.”

By late Friday afternoon, Ms. Ortega had not been formally charged in the case. Autopsies showed that said Lucia had died from “multiple stab and incise wounds” — cuts that typically cause rapid bleeding — and her brother of “incise wounds of the neck,” according to a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office.

Ms. Ortega’s friend Maria Lajara said Ms. Ortega had been living two floors below in her sister’s apartment. Ms. Lajara remembered the day last spring when Ms. Ortega stopped by and asked her to pray for her — pray that she would find a new apartment where she could live with her teenage son.

Soon, Ms. Lajara said, “she knocked on my door; she was so happy.”

“She said: ‘I got the apartment! I came to say goodbye,’ ” Ms. Lajara continued.

The new apartment was in the Bronx, and they kept in touch after she moved.

Ms. Lajara also said Ms. Ortega had talked about how happy she was with her worklife. She said Ms. Ortega had told her that she loved her job with the Krims. She told Ms. Lajara that she was paid well and treated well. She also said she was so fond of Ms. Krim that she often put in extra hours to help her.

“She really loved them, the family,” Ms. Lajara said. “She loved the kids. She would take them to the park, and she said the mom was a really good person.”

Hint of Financial Difficulties

In addition to the good pay and travel, the Krims were generous to Ms. Ortega in other ways, Ms. Lajara said. In March, Ms. Ortega passed along to Ms. Lajara a leather Ann Taylor jacket that had been a gift from Ms. Krim.

But Ms. Ortega also hinted at financial troubles. Another neighbor said she had been selling jewelry and makeup to make some extra money. Ms. Lajara said that Ms. Ortega had given someone she knew some makeup to peddle and that the woman had not come through with the money. In the last few weeks, Ms. Ortega moved back to her sister’s crowded apartment at 610 Riverside Drive. She had lost the Bronx apartment.

The superintendent at the Riverside Drive building, Fernando Mercado, said she had rented the Bronx apartment from an acquaintance who moved to the Dominican Republic. But the apartment was never in Ms. Ortega’s name, and the tenant apparently returned and threw Ms. Ortega out.

Another neighbor, Ruben Rivas, 49, described her as “kind of devastated,” and others said she had seemed nervous lately, and tired. Kenia Galo, 25, said she had mentioned it when she saw Ms. Ortega in the elevator of the Riverside Drive building.

“ ‘I am tired,’ she would say. ‘Work,’ ” Ms. Galo recalled.

In the neighborhood where the Krims lived, where nannies are often an integral part of children’s lives, news of the stabbings was met with stark disbelief. In so many households, nannies are there for meal times, for bedtime, for birthdays and holidays, even vacations. Indeed, on her blog, Ms. Krim described how she and her family had spent several days visiting Ms. Ortega’s family in the Dominican Republic, speaking to just how close her relationship had been with the family.

“We spent the past 9 days in the Dominican Republic. We spent half the time at our nanny, Josie’s sisters home in Santiago,” she wrote. “We met Josie’s amazing familia!!! And the Dominican Republic is a wonderful country!! More pics to come!!”

Recent Arrivals in City

The Krims’ neighbors said they had moved to New York from California in the last couple of years. Mr. Krim is an executive at CNBC and had previously worked at Bloomberg and Yahoo. Mark Hoffman, the president of CNBC, issued a statement on Friday that called the stabbings “a senseless act of violence.”

“There are simply no words to convey the magnitude of this tragedy,” Mr. Hoffman said.

William Krim said that CNBC had arranged for them to stay at a hotel after they left the hospital on Thursday night. “They have not gone back to the apartment,” Mr. Krim said. “I don’t know if they ever will. I don’t know if I could.”

He said they were two Californians who met in a restaurant in Venice Beach. Marina Krim had grown up in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and had degrees from the University of Southern California. Kevin Krim was from Thousand Oaks, Calif., where he was a football star. He went on to Harvard and was working at McKinsey and Company in Los Angeles when they met, William Krim said. They have been married for nine years, he said; Ms. Krim had worked in California for a wholesaler of powders made from exotic fruits, like acai berries and pomegranates, according to her LinkedIn profile.

In one post on her blog, Ms. Krim talked about how she cherished her time with her youngest child, the 2-year-old, who was known as Lito:

“One of the best parts of my day is after I drop both girls off at school and have 3 precious hours with little Lito all to myself. Ok, I’m near getting cheesy I adore this boy so much!!! He’s obsessed with collecting acorns he finds ‘on the floor,’ he loves riding ‘the school bus’ and he happily plays by himself for long periods of time. Here he has set up his kitchen in the living room and is ‘making bacon’ (not sure where he learned the word ‘bacon’)."

Reporting was contributed by Joseph Goldstein, Kia Gregory, Anemona Hartocollis, Daniel Krieger, Randy Leonard, William K. Rashbaum, Marc Santora, Nate Schweber, Jack Styczynski and Vivian Yee.