A woman allegedly killed her two children, leaving police to find them dead.
“Come get them,” Odette Lysse Joassaint allegedly told responding officers, according to WPLG. “I don’t want them anymore.”
The children’s father Frantzy Belval identified them to the outlet as Laura, 5, and Jeffrey, 3.
According to cops, Joassaint made repeated calls to 911 beginning around 8 p.m. on Tuesday but hung up. Cops responded to the home on the 100 block of Northeast 75th Street.
Joassaint seemed to be hallucinating, cops said. Miami police spokesman Officer Michael Vega described her as appearing “irate or going through a crisis.”
Police said they found the two children tied up prone by the arms, legs, and neck inside a bedroom. The kids were unresponsive. Officers untied and tried to resuscitate them, but the children were declared dead at the scene.
Belval claimed he previously reported Joassaint to the Florida Department of Children and Families, though authorities reportedly had yet to confirm that. Nonetheless, he voiced shock at the murder allegations, saying she would never do t hat.
“You’re a mother,” family friend Darlene Petion said. “How do you feel, like what is it? Is there a devil in your head?”
Jossaint’s friend Hermoine Danjour suggested that Odette broke down after DCF took her 14-year-old daughter.
“She got another daughter too that is 14 that has not been living with her since December, which means that affected her mental issue,” she told the outlet.
Joassaint faces two counts of first-degree murder. She was previously arrested in 2017 for battery against her husband, and she successfully filed for a domestic violence injunction against him in 2019. Belval was reportedly arrested in 2019 for aggravated battery against a pregnant woman.
“We have had several calls there in the past year,” Vega told WPBF about the home. “One of them was domestic violence, another was just trespass, and some disturbance calls. It’s something tragic to see that the person that is supposed to take care of these kids is the person that took their lives.”
Police ask that anyone with information on the case call Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers at (305) 471-8477.
[Screenshot via WPBF]