Pennsylvania mom says ‘crazy voices’ drove her to drown children

Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2014-04-04 04:44

Story here. Excerpt:

'A Pennsylvania woman claimed “crazy voices” told her to sit on her two children in a bathtub — drowning her 3-year-old son and leaving his 6-year-old brother critically injured, police said.
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Schlemmer was arrested after she called 911 on Tuesday to report that she dragged the two unconscious boys — Luke, 3, and Daniel, 6 — out of the tub.

The deranged woman allegedly told Allegheny County investigators that she told the children to take off their pajamas and get into the bathtub after she put her 7-year-old son, who was not named, on a school bus about 8:40 a.m., court papers show.

“Schlemmer said after the boys got into the tub, she got into the tub ‘fully clothed’ and ‘crazy voices’ were telling her to push the boys into the water,” read a criminal complaint. “Schlemmer explained that at one point she [was] sitting on top of the boys while they were under the water in the tub.”

The woman told detectives that she “thought she could be a better mother” to her oldest son “if the other two boys weren’t around,” according to the court documents.

She also believed the to boys “would be better off in heaven.”
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She allegedly tried to hide her wet clothes in a trash bag before paramedics responded to the scene.'

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Comments

Just take a look at her. Now they say you cannot judge a book by its cover but if I were going to, I'd say she's barking-at-the-moon, howling mad.

However just because you're *wacko* doesn't mean you're off the hook -- at least not in the US. In order to avoid criminal liability, you need to show (or someone needs to show it for you) that you were or still are so out of touch with the reality of cause and effect that you did not even know what you were doing. Or, that you were having such extreme hallucinations through no fault of your own (i.e., not drug-induced, etc.) that you really did think you had to kill so-and-so because at the time, they looked like a very hungry fire-breathing dragon.

However, she is a she. And she is, after all, a "mom" (and just why don't news article ever use "dad" in the headlines when reporting about a crime he did or is accused of committing?), despite killing two of her children and apparently being aware of the fact that she could get into trouble by doing so; that she tried to hide the victims' wet clothes shows it. But who knows, it may just be commitment to a psych facility until she's deemed "safe for release".

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2014-04-04 04:56