Police: Jerusalem mother accused of killing her two children is pregnant

Deemed fit to stand trial, Carina Brill was pregnant when she allegedly stabbed children to death, attempted suicide.

By DANIEL K. EISENBUD
Murder suspect Carina Brill 370 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
Murder suspect Carina Brill 370
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
Carina Brill, the Russian immigrant who remains imprisoned for allegedly brutally murdering her two children in their Jerusalem apartment in September and then attempting to take her own life, is pregnant, police said Tuesday.
A police official, who requested anonymity, confirmed reports that Brill, 36, was pregnant when she stabbed her son Igor, 7, and daughter Mira, 5, to death and then repeatedly impaled herself with the knife.
Brill, who was recently divorced and made aliya from Moscow last year with her two children without their father, was struggling to acclimate to life in Israel emotionally and financially, records state.
The official was unaware of the court’s protocol for such a situation, but according to local media reports, if Brill is deemed fit by welfare services and a Prisons Service committee to care for the baby, she is legally entitled to oversee the child for two years.
It remains unclear who the father of her unborn child is.
Since her September arrest, a state psychiatrist determined Brill is competent to stand trial, police said.
Despite Brill’s contention that she heard a man’s voice in her head compelling her to commit the murders, a psychiatric evaluation determined she was not psychotic and fully aware of her actions.
She was scheduled to meet with a Jerusalem Welfare Agency councilor just two hours following the murders, after an anonymous caller alerted the agency of her precarious mental state, as well as suspicious bruises on one of the children, one day earlier.
The children’s father, Dmitri Brill, a noted jazz musician from Moscow who arrived in Israel a little over 24 hours following the murders, said he had no indication of the danger his daughter and son were in.
Shortly following her arrest, Brill told police she killed the children because she was “not a good mother.”