‘What I did?’ NYC mom accused of hiding murdered sons in tub ranted outside shelter: sources
Cops left a Bronx home unaware the bodies of two little boys were in the family’s bathtub — partly because the killer mom apparently used clothes to cover them up, police sources said Sunday.
The officers saw water on the bathroom floor, but the tub was filled with clothing that concealed the tiny corpses — and cops had no reason to think the kids were in the home since a neighbor told police they were with their dad, sources said.
The boys’ inconsolable father discovered his dead children in the bathtub about a half-hour later, after cops had carted off the ranting mom, sources said.
The new details in Saturday’s heartbreaking case emerged as a witness claimed the mom screamed, “What I did?! What I did?!” while wandering around outside the Mount Hope shelter before the boys’ bodies were discovered.
The 22-year-old mother, Dimone Fleming, who a neighbor said previously displayed signs of possible mental issues, is accused of murdering her 3-year-old and 11-month-old sons.
The little brothers, identified by law-enforcement sources as tot Deshawn Fleming and baby Octavius Canada, were found with “multiple stab wounds” to their necks and torsos in the tub at the homeless shelter at 246 Echo Place. They were discovered by their father just before 8 p.m., police said.
Less than an hour earlier, at 7:21 p.m., officers and EMS workers had responded to a 911 call at the home that was most likely triggered by a carbon-monoxide alarm in the third-floor apartment, according to police and sources.
Police found the boys’ mother naked and “acting irrationally” in the apartment, which was filled with the noxious gas because she was lighting things on fire in the kitchen, police and sources said.
Officers took Fleming to St. Barnabas Hospital, unaware of her murdered kids under the pile of clothes in the tub.
“There wasn’t anything obvious to suggest there were dead kids in there,” a police source said. “There was no blood.”
Also, before Fleming was taken to the hospital, a family friend told cops that the woman’s children were with their father, police said.
The father of the children has been cooperative with investigators, telling them he had left the home Friday after an argument with Fleming and slept in his car that night, according to law-enforcement sources.
He was still in the area Saturday evening and alerted to the initial 911 call when a friend told him the mother of his children was being taken from the apartment in an ambulance, the sources said.
The dad made the gruesome discovery in the home about 35 minutes later, and his desperate calls for help prompted neighbors to call 911 a second time, at 7:57 p.m., officials said.
Francis Pimentel, a 30-year-old Pennsylvania resident who was visiting his mother across the street for Thanksgiving, told police he had seen an agitated young woman outside the building Saturday.
“I was waiting for the taxi out front, and I see this woman come out of 246 with [her] hands on the back of her head walk right into the street without looking. She was crazy!” he recounted to The Post on Sunday morning.
“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?!’ I went up to her and said, ‘Miss, are you OK?’ and she stopped and looked at me, her face was crazy, and then just kept walking back and forth stop[ping] and saying, ‘What I did?! What I did?!’ ” Pimentel recalled.
“I got in the taxi to go to the barbershop. When I came back, the police were all here, and they were bringing her out to the ambulance. Same woman. She went in an ambulance. Black woman 20s, maybe, 30s. I can’t believe it. I have two kids, my son [is] 4. My [other] son [is] 10. I’m so upset.”
Neighbor Shannon Holyfield said she saw the boys’ father screaming and carrying the two boys’ bodies. She described the scene as “horrible and heartbreaking.
“He was screaming hysterically,” Holyfield said of the dad. “He was screaming, ‘Help me!’ And I came and opened my door, and I see him coming down the hall with the two boys in his arms.
“They were dead. They were dead. There was blood everywhere, it covered them,” she said.
Crystal Roebuck, a 54-year-old neighbor, came to say a prayer and light a candle at the small memorial in front of the building on her way to church Sunday morning. The emotional woman said the deaths should have been prevented.
“We overlook the signs [that] everybody in the building saw. She wasn’t right!” Roebuck said of the suspected mom. “The signs were there! Now everybody in there is crying, ‘Boo hoo, I should have, I could have’ — they didn’t do nothing! They heard her screaming, mistreating those babies! They didn’t do nothing. They just put their earmuffs on, turned up the TV! Now they cryin’?!”
A woman who lives in the apartment directly below the slain boys’ home said water from the overflowing tub leaked into her apartment.
“There was water coming down from upstairs, and you could see the puddles in the hallway on the second floor, and then downstairs, you could see more water coming down. You could hear the alarm. I heard the fire alarm definitely going off, and I could smell the smoke,” said the neighbor, who asked that her name not be published.
The woman said the father of the children was a nice guy but noted that Fleming seemed troubled.
“He’s very polite. He always holds the door for me and my son. He has a job. I don’t know what he does, but I know he works. She just looked like she was never in the mood. The mother, [she] just always look[ed] like she was out of it. She just looked like she was always sad.”
The neighbor told The Post that turnover was high at the shelter, contributing to a sense of “no order” at the facility.
Holyfield said the parents of the slain children had been fighting earlier in the day. A friend of the dad had told The Post that the parents were arguing over where to bring the kids for the holiday.
A man who lives on the fourth floor of the complex told The Post he helped the panicked father pull the kids out of the tub when he found them.
“I tried to give the little baby some air, but it was too much,” the neighbor said.
“It’s just sad,” he said. “I told [the father] to put him on the bed. The oldest one, I tried to give CPR, to give him air, but it wasn’t working.”
The medical examiner was set to determine their cause of death, police said.
