LOS ANGELES—A judge ruled Oct. 17 that a woman who admitted drowning her three young children in a Reseda apartment was insane at the time of the crime about 3 1/2 years ago.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard S. Kemalyan based his ruling in the case of Liliana Carrillo on reports from three doctors.
Carrillo, now 33, had been awaiting trial in connection with the April 10, 2021, killings of her 5-month-old daughter Sierra, 2-year-old son Terry, and 3-year-old daughter Joanna.
The judge’s ruling came after Carrillo withdrew her not guilty plea and waived her right to a jury trial on her plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
A Nov. 21 hearing is set in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom regarding a recommendation of where Carrillo should be held.
At a hearing earlier this month, the judge heard from the victims’ family members, including the children’s father, Erik Denton.
“I pray what she did will haunt her for eternity,” Denton said. “I wish she would spend the rest of her life locked up. ... She deserves no peace for the rest of her life.”
Tim Denton called what happened a “parent’s worst nightmare,” and said that he still grieves the loss of his three grandchildren.
“She took pure and innocent babies and in a most brutal [way] stole them from us,” he said.
All three children were drowned, with Sierra also suffering a stab wound, according to testimony at an August 2023 hearing from a deputy medical examiner who performed the autopsy on the youngest child and supervised the autopsies of the other two children.
In an interview from jail following her April 2021 arrest, Carrillo told a reporter for NBC affiliate KGET that she drowned her children because she feared their abuse and sexual assault at the hands of others.
When asked by the KGET reporter if she regretted her actions, she said, “I wish my kids were alive, yes. Do I wish that I didn’t have to do that? Yes. But I prefer them not being tortured and abused on a regular basis for the rest of their life.”
The woman said she hugged and kissed her children and apologized to them.
The children’s bodies were discovered by their grandmother.
Kim Lormans, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Juvenile Division, testified during the hearing last year that the children were found dead on the bed in the one-bedroom apartment.
“There was blood everywhere,” the LAPD detective said.
The detective noted that Carrillo said during the TV interview that she had tried to kill herself and that it “didn’t work.”
“I tried to kill myself so I could be with my kids and it didn’t work,” Carrillo said during the TV interview. “I know that I’m going to be in jail for the rest of my life. It’s something I’ve come to terms with.”
She said in the interview that she and the children’s father shared joint custody of the children, but added that he had told her that he was going to “have me locked up in a mental ward and I was never going to see my kids again.”
Carrillo was arrested in April 2021 in the Ponderosa area of Tulare County, east of Porterville.
She has remained behind bars since then.
The children’s father filed a civil lawsuit in April 2022 against the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, alleging that Los Angeles police officers were negligent, did not take seriously the indications that Carrillo’s mental health was declining and did not share information they had with county social workers.
