Local residents pass by the memorial set up outside the Krim's apartment building

As police continue to try and discover the motive behind nanny Yoselyn Ortega’s recent stabbing of two Upper West Side children, the victimized family’s neighborhood faces the challenge of coming to terms with a tragedy that is the realization of every parent’s nightmare.

Marina Krim found Leo, her 2-year-old son, and Lucia, her 6-year-old daughter, bleeding in their bathroom’s tub on Thursday, Oct. 25. She came home with her third child after Ortega failed to meet her with Leo and Lucia at the dance studio where Lucia had a scheduled lesson. According to police, the family’s apartment at 57 W. 75th St. was dark when Marina arrived, so she asked the building’s doorman if Ortega and the kids had left, then returned to her home to check again. Ortega waited in the bathroom with the unconscious children, and plunged a kitchen knife into her own throat when Marina entered the room.

Multiple neighbors reported hearing Marina’s screams. The doorman dialed 911, and medics rushed Ortega and the stabbed children to the hospital, where Leo and Lucia were pronounced dead. Marina’s husband, CNBC executive Kevin Krim, was told of the events when he landed at John F. Kennedy Airport that evening.

Ortega fell into a coma over the weekend, but recovered shortly thereafter. Police finally were able to question her last Saturday, and a police official told the New York Times that she said she resented the family because they were always telling her what to do. She did not confess to the stabbing, but told detectives, “Marina knows what happened,” the Times reported. After the interview, police charged her with first-degree murder.

The question on the minds of most passersby in front of the Krims’ apartment on Friday, Oct. 26, was “why?”: How could a 50-year-old nanny caring for a family that was by neighbors’ accounts happy and healthy, that reportedly loved Ortega, and even spent time visiting her own family at her former home in the Dominican Republic—how could someone so immersed in their life commit such a violent act?

The question was far from disinterested speculation for many Upper West Side families. A large number of parents throughout the neighborhood employ nannies, who are sometimes hired through an agency and submitted to background checks, but just as often paid under the table and recommended by word of mouth alone. (Ortega was referred to the Krims a few years ago by her sister, Celia Ortega, 53, who told the Daily News on Friday that she would “like to die” if it would make the children come back.)

Locals were forced to look at their own beloved caretakers in a way most never had: How could they make certain that such a thing never happened to their own children?

“After this, parents should never leave their children with anybody—not alone,” said Juana Vasquez, an Upper West Side mother of four. “Take the children to a public place, like daycare. But don’t leave them in the house. Even after a background check, you can never totally trust anybody.”

A neighbor across the street from the Krims was more sympathetic to nannies’ importance in the community. “People need nannies,” she said, and contended that the murder would not significantly hurt the job prospects of local domestic workers. Still, she added, the incident would affect how they are hired: “I think people are going to open their eyes and say we’ve got to check them out. They are going to realize that if you don’t have a background check and you don’t ask questions, then you are risking your family and your life.”

A Midwesterner named Bill, whose daughter in the area employs a nanny, took a philosophical perspective on the issue. Any time you leave your kids in the care of someone else, “There’s a possibility of a tragedy like this,” he reflected. “Here in the city, the unknown is everywhere. You can’t be afraid of life because bad things can happen. I’m not sure if that’s a healthy way to live.”

Bill noted that while his daughter was shaken by the tragedy, she is very comfortable with her nanny and has no intention of letting her go.

Many locals stopped by 57 W. 75th St. with flowers or cards during the afternoon on the day after the murder, Oct. 26, to add to an already-abundant memorial of these items piled up against the building’s stone pillars. Some people came with friends, some stopped and stared at the memorial in silence. “We weep with you at your horrible loss,” said a note from Sharon and Rob Taylor, residents of a nearby building. “There are no words that can express our sadness. We pray for you and your beautiful children.”

With wiggling toddlers in strollers, nannies came to the memorial, too. They shared condolences for the family, and attempted to make sense out of the tragedy along with the rest of the community.

“I can feel the difference when I’m walking,” said one of a group of four local nannies, all of whom agreed that the Upper West Side’s domestic workers maintain a strong social network, though none knew Ortega personally (or wanted to give their names to the press). “Normally no one acknowledges you. Now everybody’s looking in your eye.”

“Now it’s like they look really hard to see if they could remember a face when something happens,” agreed a second woman.

The four said they felt secure in their jobs and would not act differently around their employers, but they thought that many nannies in the area will now have a difficult time finding jobs.

“Families are going to be scared of hiring new nannies,” said the second woman.

“They’re going to be put through a fine-toothed comb,” said the first.

“And I don’t blame them,” added the third. “This is your most precious thing,” she said, pointing to the sleeping child in the stroller in front of her. “This is what you live for.”

But when is surveillance too much? The women weighed the importance of security against Ortega’s still-largely-inexplicable attack, which even an intimate relationship with the Krim children failed to stop.

“I don’t feel comfortable with cameras,” said the first woman. “That’s too much. I did not come to do this job because I want to pay my rent. If a person doesn’t love kids, go and clean the park.”

“Are parents going to put cameras in their children’s school?” agreed the second. “They have to let go of the child at some point.”

She added that she suspected Ortega had some sort of mental disorder. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of nannies don’t have health insurance, so if there’s something wrong with them, they’re not going to go to a doctor to get it treated.”

“Well, something snapped,” the fourth woman said. “No one who is healthy in her mind does that. If somebody [else] did not walk in there and do this, then something snapped in her.”

“Snapped,” in fact, is the same word Celia Ortega used to rationalize her sister’s behavior to the New York Post. “We don’t understand what happened to her mind,” she said.

What drove an unhappy person to commit a crime that very few unhappy people do, however, remains a question that Upper West Side families, nannies included, still want more-fully answered. A clear motive, no matter how twisted, at least provides an explanation. Without one, locals are left with only Juana Vasquez’s uncomfortable maxim: “You can never totally trust anybody.”

Photo by eddzis, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

Just days after a teen punched a cop in the face and a group of teens attacked a lifeguard at McCarren Park Pool, more teenage violence  struck the Williamsburg park last week when a 16-year-old was stabbed and beaten close to death by a group of other high schoolers.

A Walk in the Park reported that the victim, whom most news sources are identifying  only as Carlos to avoid a repeat of the incident, was chased from a soccer field around the park by a group of about eight teens just before 9:30 p.m. last Friday. The group surrounded him by a baseball field and began their attack.

A couple was seated on a bench right next to the beating. “They were swinging baseball bats, punching him and throwing things. They hit him with a bottle. It was the whole group, everybody was getting their punches in. They seemed hell bent on killing this kid,” one of the witnesses told A Walk in the Park.

The witness called 911, and the attackers fled when they were told the police were coming. Carlos was attacked twice more by onlookers who pretended to come to his aid, however, before he was finally left alone, other witnesses said. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he received 27 stitches and four staples in his head.

Three men have since been arrested for the attack: Seth Martinez, 16, and Kenny Nunez, 15, and Argenis Zarzuela, 18. Each has been charged with attempted murder, gang assault, criminal possession of a weapon and menacing. They are due in court today.

The attack has sparked criticism from community members, including Carlos’s mother, for the park’s lack of police. Both NYC Parks and the NYPD  have no officers assigned to the park — or, for that matter, almost all other parks — as permanent posts.

“There’s not enough protection in that park,” Carlos’s mother told WPIX.  “And thanks be to God, it’s a miracle from God that he made it.”

According to the New York Post, the trouble began when one gang confronted another in Central Park. One group fled, heading down into the subway station at West 72nd Street and Central Park West and jumping the turnstiles. There, four teens surrounded a 21-year-old Brooklyn man who was accused of being involved with another teen’s girlfriend; he was punched in the head and stabbed in the back, police said.

The attackers—one of them a 15-year-old girl—ran out of the station and were arrested, with the three older teens getting slapped with gang assault charges.

Last year, subway agents used the emergency broadcast system inside kiosk booths approximately 500,000 times to summon police. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

While injuries from that incident were confined to the two groups who were fighting, straphangers who witnessed an earlier incident weren’t as lucky. The Post reported that another gang that had been in the park was accused of robbing and assaulting two passengers, and two other afternoon subway attacks were the handiwork of teens who had been hanging out in the park.

Of course, serious incidents like these are a rarity when it comes to trouble on our transit system. Every day, millions ride New York City’s subways and buses without any problem. But smaller crimes are more common, like the pickpocket who targeted two women on the M11 bus earlier this month. The young man was so charming that one of the women jokingly offered to let him sit in her lap. He didn’t do that, but he did allegedly reach into her bag to snatch her wallet.

“We were so shocked because we liked the guy so much,” said one of the women, who asked to remain anonymous.

They weren’t the thief’s only victims, either. In the last few weeks, two other older women were pick-pocketed as they boarded the M11 bus, which runs on Amsterdam and Columbus avenues.

And then there is the recent data showing that violent crime is on the rise in New York City. Homicides are up almost 22 percent this year, compared with the same period last year. On Easter Sunday, an unruly crowd rampaged through Times Square on a spree that left three people dead. Mayor Bloomberg described the event, which resulted in 33 arrests, as a “wilding.”

With 70 subway kiosk booths slated to close, and 3,150 fewer police officers on the ground due to state budget cuts, some New Yorkers wonder if there will be a return to the “bad old days” of subway crime in the early 1990s.

“The police department is extraordinarily stressed because of the massive reductions,” said John Jay College of Criminal Justice lecturer Eugene O’Donnell. “The table is set for problems.”

O’Donnell subscribes to the “broken windows” theory of crime, which suggests that a society that appears to be lawless will itself breed lawlessness. In the 1980s, police began prosecuting minor offenses such as turnstile jumping, often catching criminals with outstanding warrants in the process. The physical infrastructure of the transit system underwent an overhaul, and graffiti-ridden subway cars were removed from service. Crime dropped dramatically and ridership soared. Now, some are wondering if these gains will be reversed.

“There is a palpable feeling of neglect now,” said O’Donnell, who is also a former police officer and prosecutor at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

Whether recent transit budget cuts will impact safety on the subways remains to be seen. The most recent report released by the MTA details felony crimes perpetrated in the subway over a 12-year period. In the months of January and February, robberies declined steadily from 404 in 1997 to 123 in 2009. Assaults were cut in half, and overall major felonies fell from 965 to 370 during the 12-year period.

According to a press representative for the New York City Police Department, transit crime currently averages 5.6 crimes per day—in a system that transports more than 10 million people on an average workday. By contrast, there were 11 crimes per day in 2001 and 50 crimes per day in 1990. Police officials dismiss reports of increased subway crime as bogus.

“One week’s data comparison have too small a data base,” wrote a member of the Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information in an email. “It’s cherry picking, and produces wildly distorted results.”

Nonetheless, subway crime seems to inspire fears that have nothing to do with statistical tables and crime reports. The reasons for this may be partly psychological. Many subway stations are underground. There is usually only one or two immediate means of egress. Stations are dirty and rat-infested. And it’s common to cross paths with panhandlers and mentally ill passengers who travel through—or live on—the subway, which can be disconcerting for some passengers.

Statistics reveal that New Yorkers are safer in the subways than above ground, where 99 percent of crimes occur. Yet this is cold comfort to straphangers such as the 31-year-old man who was mugged by two men—one of whom flashed a silver revolver—on the No. 6 train this month, and a Westchester woman who discovered her wallet was missing at the entrance to the East 86th Street train station. The thief treated himself to a $500 spending spree at Best Buy.

Others remain optimistic about subway safety. Ernestine Trapp, a home health aid who travels from Far Rockaway to her job on Central Park West each day, does not think the MTA staff reduction will affect how she feels about the subway.

“Sometimes I don’t get in until 10 at night, but I feel safe,” she said.

“I’ve never felt unsafe in the city,” said Columbia Law School student Andrew Cascini, as he rode the C train from his home in Harlem. “I know there was a stabbing a few weeks ago, and while that was certainly tragic, I don’t think that all crimes are inherently preventable.”

But Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider’s advocacy group, is concerned that recent gains against transit crime might not hold up against budget cuts. Police presence in the subway system, he explained, was stepped up after the 1986 stabbing of Bryan Watkins by a group of young men, who approached his vacationing family to demand money. Afterward, cops began to conduct sweeps that targeted turnstile jumpers, which allowed them to catch criminals before they could enter the subway system. In 1990, Russianoff said, 19,000 felonies were recorded in the subway; by 1997, that number had gone down to about 3,500. And by 2009, felonies had shrunk to just more than 2,000.

But last year, he noted, subway agents used the emergency broadcast system located inside kiosk booths approximately 500,000 times to summon police. With the closing of many subway kiosks, there will be fewer agents to alert authorities when emergencies do occur.

And if NYPD budgets cuts go through, there will be fewer officers on the ground to rush to the rescue.

Former transit Police Chief Vincent Del Castillo, now an associate professor at John Jay College, would not speculate about whether the citywide spike in violent crime, MTA service cuts and possible reduction in police patrols would lead to a surge in crime below ground. But he does think the economic downturn is likely to impact safety.

“There is a general trend for crime to increase during poor economic times,” he said.

For O’Donnell, the John Jay lecturer, the service cuts and physical deterioration of subway stations is an uncomfortable reminder of the way things used to be. This may, he suggests, lead to a transit system that is less safe.

“We never want to get back,” O’Donnell said, “to the Russian roulette where we say, ‘Maybe we’ll have safety and maybe we won’t.’”