By TERRI VERMEULEN KEITH
LOS ANGELES — A woman who allegedly admitted drowning her three young children in a Reseda apartment was ordered to stand trial on murder charges.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert C. Vanderet rejected a defense motion Wednesday to dismiss the case against Liliana Carrillo, 32, who is charged in the April 10, 2021, killings of her 5-month-old daughter Sierra, 2-year-old son Terry and 3-year-old daughter Joanna.
The murder charge involving her youngest daughter includes an allegation that she used a knife during the commission of the April 10, 2021, crime.
All three children were drowned, with Sierra also suffering a stab wound to the chest that struck her left lung, according to 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.
“I drowned them,” she said of her children. “I wasn’t about to hand my children off to be further abused.”
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, told the judge during the hearing that the children were found dead “in a row” 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…
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