NEW YORK _ The quick-thinking superintendent of the Upper West Side building where a nanny allegedly killed two small children in 2012 barricaded the apartment door so she couldn't escape the crime scene, he said Monday.
Michael Minihan, who has five kids of his own and lived directly below the family, jumped into action when he and his wife heard anguished mom Marina Krim's blood-curdling cries around 5:15 p.m. on Oct. 25, 2012.
Krim was on the mezzanine "holding her middle child Nessie, screaming incoherently."
"They're' dead! They're dead," is all the couple could make out, Minihan said Monday in testimony at Yoselyn Ortega's first-degree murder trial in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Minihan went inside Krim's apartment and as he got closer to the back bathroom where the children were butchered "I started to hear like labored breathing from gurgling."
The first thing he saw was Ortega, "staring" at him, "the eyes of the devil in my face,"
"Her eyes were bulging," and she was clutching her blood-soaked throat after stabbing herself in the neck in a suicide bid after killing the kids.
Minihan got choked up Monday describing what he knew was also in the room _ the mutilated and blooded bodies of Lulu and Leo Krim, 6 and 2.
He said he avoided looking in their direction.
Ortega left Lulu and Leo in the bathtub to bleed out after repeatedly stabbing and slashing them in a heartless bid to spite their mother out of jealousy over her employer's blessed life.
She waited until their mother arrived to stab herself in the throat so that she could first relish in the devastated woman's pain and horror, prosecutors say.
Minihan said he was not about to let the killer go free.
"I didn't want anybody to escape whoever was in the apartment for whatever reason they weren't getting out," said Minihan, who has worked at the La Rochelle building for about a decade.
"As long as I was there _ I'm not used to anything like this," he added. "But I know one thing _ nobody was getting out of that door."
Police arrived about a minute later and entered the horrific crime scene where Ortega was by then on the ground and struggling for air from her self-inflicted knife wound.
Minihan said the bathroom was a bloody mess.
He got choked up when asked whether he knew the small victims.
"I could see like the tub and I would say a body or something. I tried as best as I could not to take my eyes off Ms. Ortega but I could see there was a mess," he said, fighting back tears. "I just saw red."
