NEW YORK — The troubled Brooklyn woman accused of drowning her three children in the ocean off Coney Island was arraigned on murder charges Friday.
A judge ordered Erin Merdy, 30, held without bail during the brief arraignment at NYU Langone-Brooklyn, where she’d been undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. Merdy allegedly drowned her children, 7-year-old Zachary, 4-year-old Liliana and 3-month-old Oliver in the surf in the wee hours on Monday morning.
Her eyes closed, Merdy whispered her responses to the judge’s question as she leaned over in her bed dressed in a yellow hospital gown, a video feed from the arraignment showed.
George Cooke, Merdy’s attorney from Brooklyn Defender Services, asked that his client be kept in protective custody as the case continues, which the judge granted.
Merdy’s panicked sister and aunt called police at about 1 a.m. Monday after the young mom called them, claiming that the “babies were gone,” police said.
Responding officers found Merdy, wet and barefoot, wandering alone along the Coney Island Boardwalk at about 3:15 a.m. A short time later, cops found her children dead in the water. An autopsy later revealed that the children had been drowned.
Merdy was incoherent when questioned by police, but she did allude to a dream she had where she had taken her children into the water, cops said.
Surveillance footage recovered by police showed Merdy walking to the beach with her three children before they died, according to court records.
Merdy’s mother told the Daily News that she thought her daughter might be suffering from postpartum depression and was described by other relatives as struggling with mental health issues.
She was served with an eviction notice on Jan. 12 claiming she was more than $5,000 behind in payments on her $1,531 monthly rent.
Zachary’s football coach said the boy regularly arrived for team practices hungry until he left the squad last year.
The boy’s mom rarely attended games to watch her son play and often left early when she did appear, said Coney Island Training Youth Program head coach Allen McFarland.
The city’s Administration for Children’s Services investigated Merdy after a father of one of the children reported that the kids weren’t going to school, but they “fell through the cracks” a few weeks before the killings, a source with knowledge of the case said.
“Her (youngest) baby was born in May and she was discharged from (ACS) services on July 15,” the source said. “Someone in the (ACS) Family Services Unit discharged her when they shouldn’t have. At the very least, a psych exam should have been done — and that wasn’t done.”
Hundreds of people attended a wake for Zachary and Liliana Thursday. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez was among the mourners.
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