ATLANTA _ Days before she allegedly stabbed and killed virtually her entire family, Isabel Martinez prayed over candles for her recently deceased father. His soul was condemned, she feared, because he practiced witchcraft in her native Mexico. Clutching rosary beads, she put the candle flame to her hands and burned herself.
That sacrificial pain, she said, would ease her father's suffering and eventually rescue him from hell.
The account above, relayed by a family member, may shed light on the early morning stabbing rampage July 6. But confounding, if not horrifying, questions remain: Did Martinez really do it, and if so, how could she? How could any mother do such a thing?
"I don't think she's a criminal," said Orlando Romero, the woman's brother-in-law. "I think she's crazy."
Her state of mind is a critical question in the murder case against the Loganville woman, who authorities say is in this country illegally.
On the one hand, many people say a mother would have to suffer from mental illness to kill her children. On the other side, people say there is no worse crime and it deserves the harshest punishment.
But know this: No crime has a higher success rate utilizing the insanity defense than a mother who kills her children, said Phillip Resnick, a psychiatry professor who has spent more than 40 years studying parents who killed their children.
"Juries are much less sympathetic to fathers who kill," Resnick said.
