LOS ANGELES — Authorities discovered the bodies of three young children at a West Hills home seven hours after paramedics were there to hospitalize their mother because she was acting strangely, police revealed Tuesday.
Angela Flores, 38, was arrested on suspicion of murder on Mother’s Day after three of her children — a 12-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old boy — were found lifeless inside a house in the 22500 block of Victory Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.
Flores admitted that she killed the children with the help of a 16-year-old boy, who also has been arrested on suspicion of murder, police said. Law enforcement sources have identified the teen as another son of Flores’. Authorities have not said when he was detained.
Neighbors said they saw Flores holding a Bible and lighting candles in a nearby yard and called authorities about the strange behavior late Saturday night.
Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said she was taken to a hospital about midnight. However, the bodies of the three children were not found inside the home until the next morning, Hamilton said Tuesday.
Margaret Stewart, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, said the agency responded at 12:48 a.m. Sunday to a “medical response” request from the Police Department and took a woman in her 30s from the Victory Boulevard block to a hospital.
Seven hours later, paramedics responded again to the block and declared three children dead at a residence, she said.
LAPD officers responded to the ranch-style house shortly after 7:40 a.m. Sunday after a 911 call reported an assault with a deadly weapon at the location, according to a department statement. Officers found the children unresponsive in the house.
Exactly how and when the three died has not been determined, with the cause and time of death still being determined by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.
Coroner’s officials identified the children as Natalie Flores, 12; Kevin Yanez, 10; and Nathan Yanez, 8.
Flores is being held in lieu of $6 million bail. The 16-year-old connected to the deaths is being held at Sylmar Juvenile Hall without bail.
Prisila Canales, who lives two houses away, said she heard a woman about 10:30 p.m. Saturday screaming, “My family is abusing me!”
Canales said she then saw the woman, who was later identified as Flores, walk into the next-door-neighbor’s yard, open a Bible and light candles.
Canales said when paramedics arrived about midnight and put her on a stretcher, the woman, who had moved into the house two or three months earlier, tried to wrangle herself free and yelled, “Where’s my Bible?”
“The screaming you heard, you knew she was not OK,” Canales said Sunday. “I can still hear her screaming.”
John, 34, who lives a block from the scene and declined to give his last name, said he heard muffled cries from a child Saturday night. “I thought I was just dreaming,” he said.
Jacob Corona, Flores’ ex-husband, said she called him nearly a week before the children were killed, and made several odd comments.
“She was telling me all this stuff about God. She didn’t sound right. I don’t really know what happened,” Corona said.
Corona said the two married in 2001 and divorced in 2007. They had not spoken regularly since their divorce, Corona said. They have a child together, but that child is not among the dead and did not live with Flores.
“So when she called me, I had my doubts,” Corona said. “She was not really religious before. But then she was talking about death. I told her, ‘What’s going on?’ My head was going over so many things, but I didn’t think anything of it.”
“I didn’t know her situation,” Corona said.
In a statement, the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services said officials were “deeply saddened by the deaths of the three children in the San Fernando Valley.” The agency said it was unable to comment on whether it had previously been involved with the family.
The abused child unit of the LAPD’s Juvenile Division is investigating the specific cause and manner in which the children died.
Hamilton said the role of another child in the killings was “very rare.”
Dr. Phillip J. Resnick, a forensic psychologist at Case Western Reserve University who has examined some 80 mothers who have killed their children, said that although there are some cases of a mother and a father together committing filicide — the deliberate act of a parent killing his or her own child — “a child’s involvement is another phenomenon.”
Resnick said parental figures have extraordinary influence over their children, which could turn dangerous if the parent’s mental state deteriorates.
“A mother may develop psychosis,” he said, “and a son may buy into it.”
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(Los Angeles Times staff writers Laura Newberry, Jeong Park and Rosanna Xia contributed to this report.)
