The bodies of two young New York City children were found stabbed to death and buried under a pile of clothes in a bathtub in the Bronx.
The boys, Deshawn Fleming, 3, and Octavius Canada, 11 months old, were found by their father with multiple stab wounds to the neck and torso of their bodies.
Initially, police responded to a 911 call at 7:20 pm over a carbon monoxide alarm. When police arrived, they found the boys’ mother, 24-year-old Dimone Fleming, naked and acting erratically. She was taken to an area hospital. Prior to departing for the hospital, a family friend told officers that the woman’s children were with their father.
While in the third-floor apartment, they turned off the running water in the bathtub that was full of clothes, unaware the boys were there.
The father, who was on the fourth floor of the building when the police were first called, returned to the third-floor apartment and discovered the boys’ bodies. He and building staff called 911 again.
Fleming is considered a person of interest in the case and is in custody, but charges had not yet been filed as of Sunday morning. The father is not in custody, according to the police.
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“There wasn’t anything obvious to suggest there were dead kids in there,” an NYPD source told the Post. “There was no blood.”
Once he got back to the apartment, the father discovered the boys’ bodies—with stab wounds to their necks—and frantically called for help, according to the Post. He and the building staff quickly called the police again, who arrived just before 8 p.m. to find the father trying to perform CPR on them. The officers and emergency personnel also tried to resuscitate the children and brought them to another local hospital, but the children were declared dead.
“The police officers who responded—I think they did a great job,” De Ceglie said. “It’s something that they are going to have to live with and think about, probably for the rest of their lives.”
Fleming is considered a person of interest in the case and is in custody, though no charges have been filed as of Sunday afternoon. The boy’s father has been cooperative with police, according to the Post, and said he had left the apartment after a fight with Fleming the day prior and slept in his car.
Witnesses told the Post they saw Fleming walking in circles and acting irrationally, mumbling to herself outside the building.
“She was walking and stopping, and turning around, and walking and stopping, with both hands on the back of her head! Saying, ‘What I did?!, What I did?!’” said Francis Pimentel, who was waiting for a cab outside the building. “I went up to her and said, ‘Miss are you okay?’ and she stopped and looked at me, her face was crazy and then just kept walking back and forth stop[ing] and saying, ‘What I did?!, What I did?!’”
While police had responded to a previous domestic incident involving Fleming, she did not have a history of mental health issues, according to the Daily News.
Neighbor Charlotte Obiri, 47, told The New York Times the image of the boys being taken from the building remained seared in her brain and left her “throwing up.”
“They brought the baby out, and they was working on him — and then the little boy, they brought him out on a gurney, and he looked lifeless,” Obiri said. “He was naked, and he looked lifeless. I still see the image in my head.”
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