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'Deceived and betrayed' by nanny's family, Krims want references law

NEW YORK — When Celia Ortega saw Marina Krim, pregnant with her third child, at a children’s dance class on the Upper West Side in April 2010, prosecutors said she approached Krim, saying she had a sister who was an “experienced nanny.”

Krim interviewed Yoselyn Ortega, who provided two references. One was her nephew’s wife, whose three children she cared for in Dallas for a few months in 2006. The other was Yaquelin Severino, who unbeknown to Krim and her husband, Kevin, was also a relative of Ortega’s and had no children at the time. The Krims tried to reach both women, but only corresponded with Severino, who gave Ortega a glowing review, falsely saying in an email she was wonderful with her son, Adrian. The next month, the Krims hired Ortega.

“What she did is not a crime in the penal law,” Stuart Silberg, a Manhattan prosecutor said in his closing remarks in state Supreme Court in Manhattan on Monday, referring to Severino. “Maybe it should be. We’ll never know what would have happened if she never sent that false email.”

The trial of Ortega, who was convicted of first- and second-degree murder Wednesday for fatally stabbing her two charges — Leo, 2, and his sister, Lucia, 6, on Oct. 25, 2012 — opened a window into an industry that is poorly regulated, and dominated by informal agreements and word-of-mouth referrals. That informal system has led to calls by the Krim family and state lawmakers for legislation that would hold child care workers and their references accountable for misrepresenting themselves.

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In a Facebook post that followed Wednesday’s verdict, Kevin Krim said he and his wife were “deceived and betrayed by the defendant’s family, who remain wholly unaccountable for their role in the murders of our children.”

Severino and Celia Ortega did not respond to email messages and telephone calls Thursday.

Assemblyman Steve Otis, a Westchester Democrat, said he is in the process of drafting legislation that would make it a crime for child care applicants to falsify information on their resumes.

“The horrific case of the Krim family and what they experienced highlighted something familiar to everybody: the task of hiring caregivers,” Otis said in a recent interview. “Under the current law, there isn’t a legal duty to protect children.”

According to testimony during the trial, Ortega’s family did not tell the Krims that she had scant experience caring for children — she had abandoned her own son when he was 4, leaving him with her sister in the Dominican Republic. She also had a long history of depression, paranoia and delusion, they testified.

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It is not uncommon for parents to make child care decisions based on feedback from their peers, and hire caretakers — nannies or baby sitters — who are paid off the books, in cash, parents and experts in the industry said. In New York City, parents face soaring costs and challenges finding high-quality, affordable care for their children, and typically rely on recommendations from others.

Agencies and licensed child care centers tend to be much more expensive, an issue that extends beyond New York. While there are local and federal programs that provide subsidies to low-income parents to assist with child care, the system in America lacks the robust infrastructure that exists in countries like Denmark and Switzerland, experts said, where such services are partially government funded.

“Places like Britain and Denmark combine paid family leave for parents with newborns, along with public preschool,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He noted that New York state is “ahead of the game, recently expanding paid leave. But we’re a half-century behind Europe in these societies’ commitment to young families.”

Regulation of child care in the country also varies from state to state and by type of care, but in-home providers are among the least monitored, experts said.

“This is a totally unregulated kind of child care,” said Julia Wrigley, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, and the author of “Other People’s Children,” about cultural differences in education. “It’s in the employer’s home. The people are not really vetted until they are already in the home.”

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Things had gone relatively smoothly for the first 18 months of Ortega’s employment at the Krim household. She was only asked to work about 20 hours a week, usually in the afternoons, as Marina Krim was a stay-at-home mother. She was rarely left with the children alone for very long. She earned at least $500 a week and helped pick up and drop off the children.

In April 2012 things began to change. Ortega had a bitter fight with her sister Miladys Garcia and was kicked out of the family apartment. She moved into an apartment in the Bronx belonging to other family members. In June, she brought her teenage son back from the Dominican Republic to live with her.

In that time, Ortega became more and more depressed, her family testified. She began to talk cryptically about feeling she was being followed by shadows, hearing voices and seeing a “black man,” relatives testified. She told her sisters to pray for her and to take care of Jesus, as if she were going away.

She also had conflicts with Krim. She chafed at doing housework, even after asking for additional hours, and declined an offer from one of Krim’s friends for a part-time job. After that refusal, Krim chastised Ortega in front of her children’s school, an exchange prosecutors said infuriated the nanny.

By late October, Ortega moved back into the family apartment. Three days before the murders, Ortega sought help from a psychologist, but neither she nor her relatives ever informed the Krim family of her declining mental state.

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On Oct. 25, 2012, after taking her middle child, Nessie, to swim class, Krim returned to her Upper West Side apartment after 5 p.m. and found her two other children dead in a bathtub and Ortega shoving a large knife into her own neck.

The case shocked parents throughout the city who rely on others to help care for their children. Christa D. Nader, president of Kith & Kin, a household staffing agency, said after the murders she recognized “a noticeable level of distrust” among some parents.

Nader said she was a nanny at the time of the murders and recounted being in a park. There were other nannies with children they were caring for. She recalled the sorrow in their faces, the tears and the constant — “I don’t understand how someone could do that.”

“We had this shared horror,” she said. “Our city relies on nannies, relies on these quality folks to be the hands, feet, mouths and voices of parents, and something like that was beyond imagination.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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JAN RANSOM and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. © 2018 The New York Times

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