Mother Drowns Two Children In Bathtub: Called Police Hours Earlier Worried About Deportation
A Delaware mother called 911 on Monday to report she had just drowned her two sons, an infant and a 5-year-old in the bathtub. This was her second call to police that day, as she had made another 911 call hours earlier with concerns that she was going to be deported.
The police remarked on Kula Pelima’s very matter-of-fact-like reporting during the second 911 call to police. This was the 911 call to report that her children were dead after she had drowned them. While telling the 911 operator what she had done, Pelima made that report without emotion and just basically stated the facts.
Pelima, who is originally from Liberia, has lived in the U.S. for the past two decades and police said she is a “permanent resident with no criminal convictions.” So authorities are not clear on her reasons for calling the police just hours before drowning her sons with her concerns about being deported.
The Guardian reports that a police officer visited Pelima after she made the first 911 call at 3:45 a.m. on Monday when she expressed her concerns about possibly being deported. She was worried her visa had lapsed, but police weren’t going to arrest her and everything seemed fine at the home. The officer reports he saw the older son and he looked fine. The second 911 call came in at about 8:30 a.m. that same morning, but this time Pelima reported that she had drowned her children.
Wilmington Police Chief Robert Tracy held a news conference on the deaths of these two boys, according to Fox News. He talked about the phone call that Pelima had made prior to the 911 call to report that she had just drowned her boys in the bathtub.
“She was concerned about her immigration status. She’s a Liberian immigrant that came to the country in 1997, and she was worried about what could happen to her because her boyfriend… [the father of both boys] was picked up also by the feds on some immigration issues on Oct. 6.”
Kula Pelima Liberian mother fearing deportation drowns her infant sons https://t.co/7eFnDHEoFX #Solomon Epelle #Alex Epelle #Victor Epelle
— Scallywagandvagabond (@ScallywagNYC) October 18, 2017
Tracy remarked on the demeanor of Pelima during the 911 call, saying that Pelima had admitted to drowning the boys in that phone call and she sounded “controlled.” He also commented that this was out of character for someone who had just “murdered two children.”
She was “very calm, and actually stayed on the line for us and was pretty matter of fact of ‘Yes, there’s two homicides,'” Tracy said about the mother. The boys have been identified as 4-month-old Solomon Epelle, and 5-year-old Alex Epelle, according to authorities.
The 30-year-old mother is now being held on a $2 million bond charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Tracy said the crime was so disturbing that it was even shocking to the hardened officers on the force.
The father of the two children is from Nigeria, and he was taken into custody by immigration officers on September 14, in Pennsylvania. The couple lived in Wilmington together, authorities report.
Victor Epelle, 38, is legally in this country, but while ICE reports he violated the terms of his status, they did not say what he had done. Epelle was released from his detainment “on humanitarian grounds” after he was notified that his two sons were dead.
[Featured Image by Wilmington Police Department/AP Images]
