Three children were found dead at a Los Angeles home over the weekend and their mother and a teenager were arrested, police said Monday.
Officers responded to a call reporting an assault at the home in the San Fernando Valley Sunday morning and found three unresponsive children, said Officer Lizeth Lomeli, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson.
Paramedics pronounced the children dead and CBS Los Angeles identified the victims as a 12-year-old girl, an 8-year-old boy and a 10-year-boy.
Police did not disclose information about how investigators believe the children were killed. The victims were two boys and a girl, Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner said in an email.
Police identified the children’s mother as Angela Flores, 38. A 16-year-old was also detained, but the teen’s identity and relationship to the family was not immediately made public by police.
While Flores was arrested in three of the killings, the teen was arrested in one of them, police said.
Flores “admitted to killing her children,” the police statement said. But it was not immediately known whether she had a lawyer who could speak on her behalf. Online jail records showed she was detained on $6 million bail, with no court date set yet.
Prisila Canales, who lives near the ranch-style house in the West Hills neighborhood where the killings happened, told reporters there was a disturbance late Saturday night in which the woman screamed and acted erratically until someone called authorities.
Canales said paramedics put the woman on a stretcher. “She kept popping up, jumping up saying, ‘Where’s my Bible? Where’s my Bible?” Canales told CBS Los Angeles.
The mother was heard screaming, yelling, praying and lighting candles at other homes on the street.
“I heard someone screaming, ‘My family is abusing me,’ and all kinds of nonsense. I couldn’t make out what it was.” Canales told CBS Los Angeles.
Blanca Hernandez lives next door and was she said she called 911 Saturday night when Flores began acting erratically on her front lawn. Flores was taken to the hospital for mental health reasons, but Hernandez didn’t realize she was her neighbor.
“I never saw her, if she lived here or she lived there. I never saw her,” she said.
If you or someone you know needs help with a mental illness, contact the NAMI Helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or info@nami.org or visit https://www.nami.org/help.
