Mother accused of smothering three children left notes

A mother accused of smothering her three young children left notes that officials say could help determine what led to the killings, and her priest said that she had expressed “tremendous remorse”.

Paula Eleazar Mendez, 43, was in a county jail yesterday after being taken to hospital for swallowing a toxic substance.

She had collapsed as officers arrived at her De Queen Arkansas home on Saturday morning in response to a telephone call from the children’s father in New York.

Inside the home, the officers found the bodies of the children, ages six to eight lying side by side on a bed, said Chris Brackett, an investigator with the Sevier County Sheriff’s Office.

“I do not believe there is any dispute as to who killed these three children, and therefore who will be charged,” prosecutor Tom Cooper said. “However, we have not determined at this time the particular homicide charge or punishment we will be seeking.”

De Queen Police Chief Richard McKinley said investigators needed a translator to read the notes that were written in Spanish.

A family priest who visited Mendez in a hospital on Saturday night described a woman experiencing profound sorrow.

“She has tremendous remorse. She is deeply sorry,” the Rev. Salvador Marquez-Munoz said yesterday before entering St. Barbara Catholic Church for Mass.

“She asked for our prayers and forgiveness because she is realising how much she has hurt the community, as well.”

He identified the children as eight-year-old Elvis and six-year-old twins, Samanta and her brother Samuel.

Autopsies were planned to determine whether the children had been poisoned or smothered, as their mother told police, Cooper said. The children’s faces were not covered when police found them.

Cooper said an emergency room doctor told him Mendez had not ingested enough of the toxic substance to kill herself. She is expected to be charged today, McKinley said.

A neighbour said Mendez was distraught because her husband wanted a divorce, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported for today’s editions.

“She was depressed,” Javier Garcia said through an interpreter, explaining that she wept often for several weeks after learning the news during a trip to New York City.

In the house’s yard yesterday was a seven foot-wide pile of burned papers. A page in a religion book bore the words “vamos a celebrar” – Spanish for “let’s celebrate”. A child’s handwriting was scrawled in blue ink across some papers, and there were charred letters from a labour union in New York City.

The priest said Mendez, who moved to the US from Mexico 10 years ago, had lived in New York until last summer, when she moved with her children to De Queen because wanted them to live in a safer environment.

He described her as a quiet, devout woman concerned about her children’s welfare. She was not working, and her husband was supporting the family with a job in New York, he said. She and the children never missed Sunday services and attended religious education classes.

Mendez seemed “very loving”, said Rocio Maya, 29, who attended the Mass and said she had known Mendez for a few months.

“Many times she showed me photos of her children,” she said. “She showed me when she was pregnant with each one of them, photos of her husband, of the happy life that they had always lived.”

She appeared to have few friends and “didn’t go out on the street much,” Maya said.

Maya’s husband, Juan Mosqueda, said the children’s father, Arturo Morales, 37, had planned to move to De Queen once the mortgage was paid on the house there.

Morales was to arrive in De Queen before a funeral was to be set.