Mother convicted of murdering her 2 young children
Carina Brill, 36, faces two life terms for stabbing to death son, 7, and daughter, 5, in 2013
The Jerusalem District Court on Sunday convicted Marina Brill of killing her 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter a year and a half ago.
Judges wrote in the verdict that Brill’s actions “were hard to bear” and that “first instincts direct one to think that it is impossible that a mother would murder her two children so cruelly without a mental illness lurking in the background, but one cannot explain away the deed this way.
“Despite her mental issues, during the act Brill had the capacity to understand her act was wrong,” the judges wrote.
Brill’s attorney, Ariel Herman, said she would appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court. She faces two life terms in prison.
Brill, 36, admitted to stabbing her two children to death and attempting suicide afterward in late September 2013.
She told police her version of the events from a hospital bed at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem, explaining that she committed the deed because she “felt [she] was not a good enough mother for the children.”
Doctors who treated her for self-inflicted stab wounds discovered she was pregnant. She refused to abort. According to a report in Walla from November 2013, a committee of welfare experts and psychiatrists were set to decide whether she would be allowed to raise the child or whether welfare services would remove the child from her.
There was no word of the baby’s fate on Sunday, when she was convicted.
In 2013, emergency services found her children, Igor and Maria, with multiple stab wounds in an apartment on Ein Gedi Street in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem, according to police.
The father of the children told Channel 10 that he had no indication that Brill would commit such an act.
“If I had known, I would have taken them immediately,” Dmitri Brill, who resides in Russia, said.
Initial reports said that the mother’s sister, who was in the apartment at the time, called police after she awoke to the sound of screams as her sister attacked the children. A police official said the sister was an eyewitness to the attack and unsuccessfully tried to stop the mother.