A 30-year-old mother who refused to answer questions from police is reportedly suspected of drowning her three children in the waters off a Coney Island beach in the early hours of Monday.
A boy and two girls were found unconscious on the sand before 5 a.m. Efforts to revive them were unsuccessful, police said.
A senior law enforcement source identified the mom to The Daily Beast as Brooklyn resident Erin Merdy. It is unclear if she yet has legal representation. The kids were identified by authorities as Zachary Merdy, 7; Lilana Merdy, 4; and 3-month-old Oliver Bondarev.
ADVERTISEMENT
Derrick Merdy, who identified himself to The New York Times as 7-year-old Zachary’s father, told the paper he had been fighting to get custody of the children ever since their split shortly after Zachary’s birth in March, 2015. The pair met on Facebook in 2014, he said.
“I was trying to get my son. Now that’s not going to happen,” he said. The Times noted Merdy then began “breaking into sobs.”
He recalled how his son told him that there wasn’t enough food to eat with his mom, and how he would be moved to shelters where he would be forced to defecate in a bowl.
“I don’t know, she makes me starve,” Zachary allegedly told his dad. “I didn’t do nothing bad; she makes me starve.”
Reached by phone on Monday afternoon, Merdy’s aunt Dine Stephen told The Daily Beast, “Basically, people have mental issues, and that’s what needs to be focused on. A lot of people are struggling nowadays, and she was one of them. She struggled.”
“No one expected it to get to this level,” she added. “But obviously, she’s a woman who needs help. She has mental problems. We ask for people to have some grace and understand that. She’s not an evil person. She has mental issues that need to be addressed.”
In a separate interview, Stephen told the New York Daily News that “many family members have struggled with mental illness.”
“We lost Erin’s father... a few years back and now his precious grandchildren are gone,” she said, referring to her brother’s death.
Merdy’s uncle Eddy Stephen lives in Columbus, Georgia. He said he got the news from Dine around lunchtime on Monday and was devastated.
“I knew she had some mental issues, with depression and stuff like that, but... not to that extent,” he told The Daily Beast. “I’m lost for words. We are all shocked by the situation. I don’t know what to say.”
Police responded to a call at around 1:40 a.m. from a concerned relative who “indicated she was concerned that her family member may have harmed her three small children,” according to New York Police Chief of Department Kenneth Corey.
Police then carried out a welfare check on the home, where they found the children’s father, who shared concern for his children’s safety and said he thought Merdy may have taken them to the boardwalk.
Police then searched for around 90 minutes for the family on the Coney Island beach. They then received another call from a family member who was with Merdy—who was soaking wet and barefoot—some two miles from where they eventually found the children. A police source told The Daily Beast that Merdy did not have a criminal record or known history of domestic issues.
Police took Merdy in for questioning but said she had not responded to queries. Police are now searching for witnesses who might be able to shed light on the circumstances surrounding the apparent drowning. A police source told the News that Merdy called a cousin and confessed to having drowned her kids. Cops are now looking at postpartum depression as a possible motive, according to ABC News.
Merdy’s neighbor Nargul Gunibekova said things became chaotic in the building in the aftermath of the grisly discovery on the beach.
“All night, people were screaming here, crying here, knocking on all the doors,” Gunibekova told The Daily Beast, noting that Merdy and her family moved in “not so long ago, I think less than a year.”
Merdy was quiet but “had a little crazy in her eyes” when Gunibekova saw her around their complex.
“We don’t know these people, they weren’t like, social or anything,” she continued. “These ones, they kept by themselves, they come and go in the middle of the night… Usually, you move into a building, you see the neighbors, you introduce yourself, ‘Hi, I’m so-and-so, I’m your new neighbor.’ These people, no. They didn’t say hi, nothing. I didn’t even know their names.”
An administrator at the Coney Island Lighthouse Mission, a nonprofit food pantry and soup kitchen on Coney Island’s Mermaid Avenue, told The Daily Beast on Monday that he doesn’t “personally know the family, but we are praying for the community.”
“Everyone is really shocked,” he said. “We’re all still just trying to figure out what was the cause of it.”
Gunibekova is also hoping for answers but meanwhile struggles to process the allegations against the young mother next door.
“Poor children, it’s a horrible, horrible tragedy,” she said. “You can’t believe it really, how that’s possible.”
To Merdy’s family, what comes next remains uncertain.
“We’re taking it day by day,” her aunt said. “That’s all we can do.”
Her uncle said he was still “in shock” and was searching for the right words to express his deep sorrow.
“The way life is now, sometimes the way it turns, it’s tough,” he said. “But this is really just sad, sad news today.”
—With reporting by Michael Daly
