‘Shadows’ Stalked Nanny Before Killings, Witnesses Say

“She said that she saw a black shadow that speaks to her, that mentions her name.”

Thus the testimony of a young woman came to a climax after  taking the witness stand Thursday to describe meeting the now-infamous alleged “killer nanny” just hours before the babysitter brutally murdered the two toddlers in her care.

Jennifer Mercedes Reynoso Moya  a 19-year-old neighbor of the nanny at the time of the killings recalled her reaction when the defendant, Yoselyn Ortega, described her hallucinations: “I said, ‘Oh my god,’ I said, ‘she’s crazy.’”

Reynoso’s testimony was central to the defense’s case that Ortega is not guilty due to insanity.

With animated hands and furrowed brows, the witness detailed the events of Oct. 25, 2012 via a translator. She had been living with her aunt and was home alone when at around 1:30 pm she heard a knock and opened the door to see Ortega, who was then a complete stranger to her.

Ortega, who lived in the same building as Reynoso, mentioned that she was friends with Reynoso’s aunt and wanted to cook something. After confirming these details with her aunt, Reynoso invited the defendant into the apartment.

Just four hours later, Ortega would fatally and repeatedly stab four-year-old Lucia and two-year-old Leo Krim in the bathtub of their Upper West Side home.

“She looked very odd, very nervous,” Reynoso told the jury.

She detailed how Ortega had gone into the kitchen to make plantains, but kept pacing in and out of the room, making phone calls and acting “weird.”

“She was looking side to side a lot with her eyes, fast,” Reynoso said, gesturing with her index fingers from one side of the room to the other.

She explained that she eventually became so uncomfortable with the defendant’s behavior that she locked herself in her room.

Then, things got scarier for her.

“She knocked on my door and said, ‘I don’t want to be alone, come sit with me in the living room,’” Reynoso recalled.

When Reynoso asked Ortega why she didn’t want to be alone, Ortega confided in her, saying that she was hearing voices and seeing “black shadows.”

“I wanted her to leave because I was so scared,” Reynoso said.

She called her aunt to tell her what had happened, and remembered her aunt simply responding, “Yes, she sees monsters.”

Reynoso’s testimony provided support to the defense’s claim that Ortega had been psychologically unstable prior to the killings.

The prosecution’s cross-examination suggested that the testimony was influenced by the defense’s family and not completely accurate. Assistant DA Courtney Groves focused her questioning on why Reynoso did not report the details about these hallucinations to the psychiatrist who interviewed her or to police officers until a few years after the murder.

The defense also called to the stand members of Ortega’s family—her niece, adoptive brother, and son—to bolster their argument that her mental state had been deteriorating in the months leading to the murders.

All three members recalled that Ortega had been stressed for various reasons: she was moving between the Bronx and Manhattan, she was worried about her son’s school, and she had been fighting with her sister.

“She was always crying, always sad,” recalled Glendalys Garcia, the defendant’s niece, who lived in Dallas, Texas but would receive up to three phone calls a day from the defendant during the months prior to the October 2012 murders.

Garcia remembered visiting the defendant in New York in September 2012 and being shocked that she had lost weight and had bags under her eyes. “She wasn’t herself… normally she’s very cheerful, talking to us,” she said.

However, none of her relatives were aware of any hallucinations or psychosis; they could only recall a “sadness” and that Ortega had complained about severe headaches.

The family members who testified were careful to step around the word “murder,” with her son Jesus Frias even calling the event an “accident.”