A New York City woman is in custody for allegedly murdering her two children and concealing them underneath a pile of clothes in their Bronx homeless shelter apartment.
Dimone Fleming, 22, is accused of murdering her 11-month-old and 3-year-old sons on Saturday.
Officers from the New York Police Department responded to a 911 call triggered by a smoke alarm coming from Fleming’s third-floor apartment at a homeless shelter in the Bronx. When officers arrived at around 7:20 pm on Saturday, they found Dimone Fleming naked and agitated, ranting and burning objects in her kitchen.
Officers searched the apartment and found water on the bathroom floor and the bathtub full of clothes, concealing the boys’ tiny bodies. The officers did not think much of the bathtub as a neighbor they had spoken to earlier told them the boys were with their father and not at the home.
Unaware of the murdered kids in the bathtub, the police took the mother to St. Barnabas Hospital.
About half an hour after the police had left, at around 8 pm, the boy’s father, Columbus Canada, discovered the bodies of his children in the tub. Neighbors called 911 again after hearing the father’s screams and calls for help.
New York City Police Department officers identified the two slain children as three-year-old Deshawn Fleming and 11-month-old Octavius Canada. They had multiple stab wounds in their torsos and necks.
According to the police, during their initial visit, there was nothing to suggest the mom murdered the boys in the apartment or hid them under a pile of clothes in the bathtub, as there was no blood in the apartment.
The father of the boys told police that he had left the night before after he and Fleming had a heated argument. The father, who, according to the police, was cooperative, said he had slept in his car on Friday night.
On Saturday evening, a friend alerted him that police had visited his apartment and taken Fleming in an ambulance.
The dad went to check on his children, and that is when he made the gruesome discovery.
A man who lives in a nearby apartment told the police he had encountered Fleming earlier in the day, and she seemed agitated and distressed. Francis Pimmel, 30, said he was waiting for a taxi outside when Fleming walked into the street with her hands at the back of her head. She walked back and forth, repeatedly saying, “What did I do?”
Police said she might have murdered her children because she thought the devil possessed them. Casey Canada, Columbus Canada’s aunt, said that Fleming had been obsessed with demonic entities, and she was afraid of her children because she thought they were devils.
A few hours before she killed her boys, Fleming wrote a Facebook post asking for mercy for all her wrongdoings. The post also included her saying she was leaving everything that no longer served her.
The police also revealed that she had been on the radar of the child welfare agency in New York City shortly after she gave birth to her three-year-old son, over suspicion of improperly caring for him.
The cause of the death is being investigated.
