ATLANTA — Days before she allegedly stabbed and killed virtually her entire family, Isabel Martinez prayed over candles for her recently deceased father. His soul was condemned, she feared, because he practiced witchcraft in her native Mexico. Clutching rosary beads, she put the candle flame to her hands and burned herself.
That sacrificial pain, she said, would ease her father’s suffering and eventually rescue him from hell.
The account above, relayed by a family member, may shed light on the early morning stabbing rampage July 6. But confounding, if not horrifying, questions remain: Did Martinez really do it, and if so, how could she? How could any mother do such a thing?
“I don’t think she’s a criminal,” said Orlando Romero, the woman’s brother-in-law. “I think she’s crazy.”
Her state of mind is a critical question in the murder case against the Loganville woman, who authorities say is in this country illegally.
On the one hand, many people say a mother would have to suffer from mental illness to kill her children. On the other side, people say there is no worse crime and it deserves the harshest punishment.
But know this: No crime has a higher success rate utilizing the insanity defense than a mother who kills her children, said Phillip Resnick, a psychiatry professor who has spent more than 40 years studying parents who killed their children.
“Juries are much less sympathetic to fathers who kill,” Resnick said.
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On Monday, Martinez’s court-appointed attorney Robert Greenwald said that a psychiatric evaluation of Martinez, which was delayed, “will happen.”
Martinez initially resisted a lawyer but Greenwald said, “She’s become more comfortable with allowing people to try and help her.”
In the slumbering quiet before dawn on July 6, authorities say the 33-year-old mother grabbed a black knife with a serrated blade from the kitchen and killed 2-year-old Axel, 4-year-old Dillan, 7-year-old Dacota Romero and 10-year-old Isabela Martinez. And when her husband, Martin Romero, tried to stop her, she cut him down, too, police said.
Martinez’ 9-year-old daughter, Diana, was the sole survivor of the attacks and saw the tragedy unfold. Before her mother attacked her, Martinez told the little girl that she was going to the sky to meet Jesus, according to the girl’s account to a state child welfare caseworker. Diana said she cried, pleading with her mother that she didn’t want to go see Jesus. Martinez told the girl she loved her and asked her forgiveness.
And then, police say, she repeatedly stabbed her daughter.
The day after the killings, Martinez behaved strangely in court. She not only showed no remorse, she played to the news cameras, flashing a thumbs-up sign and pressing her hands together in a pose of prayer.
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Isabel Martinez doesn’t fit neatly into any scripted profile of a maternal child-killer, but, then again, experts say there’s no one narrative for such people.
“One size does not fit all,” said Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He added, “Sometimes there are red flags, sometimes there aren’t.”
In all likelihood, these killings were planned, Resnick said.
“People just don’t snap,” he said, and not all who commit filicide are psychotic, in that they have no grasp on reality.
What makes Martinez’s case such an outlier is her alleged attempt to kill her entire family, including her husband. Technically, thatap called familicide. (Filicide is when a person kills his son or daughter.) Also, women account for only 5 percent nationally of familicides.
Resnick identified a handful of motives in his 2007 World Psychiatry study on maternal filicide. Sometimes the children’s death comes as the unintended result of a cycle of abuse. Sometimes the parent feels overburdened by the child, or wants to do something to hurt her spouse. The most common motive is that the mother has somehow convinced herself that killing her child is in the child’s best interest.
“Looking at the world through her depressed eyes, the mother believes her child is better off in heaven,” Resnick said.
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Orlando Romero lived just a few units away in the Loganville mobile home park where his brother, nieces and nephews were killed. He said the family was no different than most.
“They argued like all families do, but they didn’t harm one another, and they never mistreated the children,” Orlando Romero said. “They were both good parents and you could tell they loved each other very much.”
The state child welfare agency got a good look at the family in early 2015, when a complaint reached the agency that the father was disciplining the children by hitting them. The agency visited the family and the parents acknowledged at the time that they sometimes hit the children with a belt on their behinds.
During unannounced visits, caseworkers with the state Division of Family and Children Services found the Martinez’s home “clean and organized.” The children were “quite well-behaved,” according to the DFCS report, although there was some concern about Martinez’s “protective capacity.”
Sandra Romero, a cousin of Martinez’s late husband, told the agency that the children were always “healthy and happy” and she found their mother to be “very caring.”
The agency closed the case shortly thereafter.
Two years later, weeks before the stabbing incident, Martinez’s father died and, according to those who know her, thatap when everything changed.
“She used to be a calm, happy person,” said neighbor Pedro Ramirez, 15. “She invited us over to her house, had barbecues.”
“Now she’s yelling at people,” Ramirez said. “She’s just very upset.”
