From the Past: Carol Coronado
A mother pushed to edge murders her three little girls. Did she suffer from postpartum psychosis or did her neglectful husband push her too far?
When Julie Piercey received a call from her son-in-law, Rudy, to ask her to come over and tend to her daughter because she was “acting weird,” it was one of many times her phone had rang that day. Her daughter kept pleading for help. Julie later said she sounded scared and paranoid.
That morning, May 20, 2014, Carol, her 30-year-old daughter, had called to see if her mother could come to the house, but Julie was at work.
Her son-in-law was across the street, underneath a truck, doing some work on it, when she arrived about a half hour after the most recent call, about 4 p.m. Despite his wife being overwhelmed with the kids, tired, and taking on the brunt of the housework with help from her mother, he was still just doing his own thing, calling his mother-in-law when it seemed he couldn’t handle Carol anymore.
A mother’s work was never done.
Julie entered the home, calling out her daughter’s name.
“Carol? Carol?”
According to Julie, Carol “came out that room flinging her hand towards the floor and saying, ‘Mom, what are you doing here?’”
Julie must have been shocked. Carol had emerged from wherever she had been, naked, apparently surprised to see her mother in her house.
“Carol, Mom came to see if you’re okay,” Julie told her before giving her a hug. “How was your day?”
Julie would later tell a courtroom that Carol just shrugged at the question.
“It was a bad day, Mom,” Carol replied.
It was a bad day.
Julie went to check on her three granddaughters: Sophia, 2 1/2; Yazmine, 16 months; and Xenia, 2 months. They were laying in Carol’s bed, in order of age. Julie commented that the girls were sleeping. Carol didn’t respond to her. But when Julie looked at the kids more closely, she saw something on Sophia’s cheek.
“I go, ‘Oh, that’s red on Sophia’s cheek. Um, is this a sunburn?’” she said. “And then I seen a knife come up. It pointed that way, never pointed toward me, but pointed in that direction, and I go, ‘Oh hell no,’ and I grabbed her wrist. And she put her wrist down, and I took that knife easy, real easy. There was no resistance.”
Prosecutors would later claim Carol lunged at her mother, but Julie denied this.
“She lowered her wrist, and I took the knife from her,” she explained, “And then I walked into the living room and she kept calling me, ‘Mom, Mom’ and tapping my shoulder, ‘Mom, Mom.’ I said, ‘Not now, Carol, not now.’”
Julie said she ran outside, dropped the butcher knife on the driveway, and screamed. The horror of what she had seen set in. The girls had each been stabbed, their throats slit.
Outside, working on the truck, ensuring the starter he’d bought for his truck was the right one, Rudy heard his mother-in-law’s screams.
“The way she screamed was kind of weird. She said, ‘Don’t go in there. She killed them,” he later said in court.
Rudy rushed into the house only to find that Carol had fled into the bedroom and locked the door. He kicked it down.
“I saw my daughters laying on the bed,” he said. “I saw them laying down like they were asleep.”
He claimed that Carol knelt on the bed behind them. Julie said Carol almost seemed to be trying to protect the kids with her hand on them.
After yelling at them to get away, she laid on the bed with a knife in her left hand before she lifted her breast with her right hand and putting the knife over her heart.
“She was completely insane,” Rudy later testified. “That was not Carol. … The look in her face told me she was completely out of character.”
She told him she loved him, then stabbed herself.
“I wanted to do it myself after I saw what I saw. She was too good a woman to do something like that,” Rudy said when asked if he tried to stop her.
He explained that she had a blank stare, as though she were “possessed.” He called 911 and could only stand in the doorway, asking his wife why she had murdered their children while waiting for the cops and paramedics to arrive.
It was all he and Julie could do, wait in shock and horror. The worst had been done.
It was a bad day.
The Interrogation and investigation: “I just want to be loved”
Handcuffed and covered in a blanket, Carol followed police out of the house, much to the dismay of neighbors. Ashley Madrid, a neighbor, told the LA Times that the scene was a sorrowful one.
“She had a zoned-out look and was just looking down,” Madrid said. “She had dry blood smeared on her face and legs.”
She described how Rudy collapsed on the street while Sheriff’s Deputies escorted him out to a patrol car.
“It was very horrible to see. Very heartbreaking,” she said.
Sheriff’s Lt. Dave Coleman told the media that police removed several knives from the house. At the time, they couldn’t be sure if the children had suffered any other injuries. An autopsy would determine the full extent of the damage.
One of the first things investigators did was look into Carol’s medical history and whether she had any postpartum depression diagnoses since the birth of her youngest daughter.
Her father-in-law told the Times that there were no red flags leading up the incident, that she was “trying to go to school and take care of the kids.”
In the house, according to court documents, police saw three kitchen knives and a pair of scissors lined up next to each other on the counter. Two of the knives had blood on them. A fourth knife was discovered on the floor between two cribs in the bedroom, also bloodied. A bloody hammer lay near the girls, and another knife was found beneath the bedding.
Sophia, who was two and a half, suffered two sharp force injuries to the front of her neck and to her left chest, accompanied by abrasions to the upper left side of her neck and chest. Yazmine, 16 months, had defended herself against her mother’s attack, judging from the wounds on her hands, and ultimately suffered from four sharp force injuries to her neck and one to her left chest. She also had blunt force injuries on her scalp, and bruises on her legs. Xenia, the infant of only two months, had three sharp force injuries to the neck and one to the chest.
And, bizarrely, a cross had been drawn on the childrens’ chests in blood.
Carol was taken to the Torrance Memorial Medical Center to have the self-inflicted knife wound treated. While there, Homicide Sgt. Robert Martindale interrogated her twice.
During those conversations, Carol disclosed to Martindale that she had been molested as a child. The San Bernardino Sun reported on Martindale’s testimony in court regarding these conversations.
“What happened to your daughters?” he asked repeatedly.
“She said, ‘I had to do it. I didn’t mean to do it,’” Martindale explained. “I asked her ‘What were you trying to do? Were you taking the kids to heaven?’ She said, ‘Is that a bad thing?’”
In describing her marriage, Carol said it was a loving one, but at times she felt taken advantage of. They had financial problems, with Rudy being the sole working parent and three kids almost back to back. She said she and Rudy barely had enough money for clothes and bills.
“She was a full-time mom with very little help from Rudy. That’s what she described,” Martindale said.
“Did you kill the kids to get back at your husband in some way?” he asked her. “And she said, which took me by surprise, ‘If that’s true, can I get a deal?’”
“Two other times she goes, ‘I didn’t mean to do it, sir,’” he added.
Martindale said he felt compassion for the woman and touched her hand in an attempt to calm her.
“I just want to be loved,” she said, according to him.
Did Carol experience postpartum psychosis or did she seek vengeance against a husband who gave her three kids, no help, and wanted a divorce?
Carol Coronado hadn’t been herself for a few weeks. According to a series of reports from the Daily Breeze, Rudy testified that she “was acting weird, rambling a lot.” He claimed she had become aggressive towards him. She began trying to keep the children from him, even forcing him to eat outside.
In one incident while he was home watching TV, she shut the power off, walked up him, and jumped on him to land on his stomach. She had previously scolded him for watching “Family Guy” in front of the kids, telling him it was inappropriate for them to watch. He later testified that he paid no attention to the plot and would “just sit there and watch the little cartoons.”
She didn’t eat much at home, but could fill eight plates at a buffet.
On May 20, Rudy said he awoke at about 6 or 7 a.m., after Carol had already been up with the kids. She had awakened with what Rudy described as a “psychotic scream.”
“Carol was out of it,” he said. “She woke up and she was just screaming, like a weird scream, like a psychotic scream.”
Rudy went outside to work on his truck, leaving Carol with the kids despite her screaming. He gave her $100 to get gas and “to do what she had to do.” She went out with the kids to take one of them to a doctor’s appointment, but called him later to inform him she had run out of gas.
When he found them, they were at a nearby McDonald’s. The kids were eating burgers in the backseat, though Rudy noted that they were dirty and one smelled like they needed a diaper change. He admitted he raised his voice at her when he took her and the kids to get gas for her car.
“I was a little agitated on how she was acting because she, she just didn’t seem there,” he explained. “She just didn’t seem like Carol. She seemed different, like I don’t know how to explain it. … She was there physically, she wasn’t there mentally.”
Carol, he said, had a blank stare. Still, he told her to go home. When he got the house, Carol had gone to bed, her feet covered in dirt. When he told her to get up, she replied that she was tired.
“I’m tired, too,” he told her. “I got to go to work.”
He had come inside to grab some money, according to the San Bernardino Sun, but happened upon a massive mess.
“I came in to grab some money, and I seen my daughter running around the house and naked, and she had poop all over her body,” he later testified. “There was a big old puddle of poop in the living room, and I remember telling Carol, ‘Carol, what’s going on? What’s happening?’ She just kept saying that she’s tired and her eyes were like out, completely out of it. Kept saying she was tired. ‘I’m tired. I’m tired.’ ”
Despite that mess, Rudy left it for Carol to deal with and went back outside.
He later testified that he was raised to believe the mother should care for daughters, so men could avoid what he called “legal issues” with young girls.
Before all this, though, Rudy said he and Carol had a good marriage. He called her a “very good mother.” While he admitted to threatening divorce when they argued, he never followed through with it.
“It was good,” he said. “It was like every other relationship. Since the day I met her, I liked the person she was.”
The couple met and married in 2010 while Carol went to school, worked for a doctor, and served in the U.S. Navy Reserve. Carol left the Navy due to medical reasons. They settled in West Carson, an unincorporated community of Los Angeles in the South Bay, with a population of almost 23,000 as of 2020.
Once the babies began arriving, she gave up her career to be a stay-at-home. None of the three pregnancies were planned, Rudy admitted, although Carol had wanted children. He worked long days selling auto parts at local swap meets.
Julie Piercey told the court later that Rudy didn’t support his wife.
“She wasn’t getting help with the children,” she said.
The Trial
By the time the case reached court, the prosecution accused Carol of premeditating the murders, while the defense claimed she suffered from severe depression and postpartum psychosis. They painted a picture of a mother who was overwhelmed and under-appreciated.
On May 29, 2014, Carol pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder for the attack on her mother. The LA Times had a reporter in the courtroom that day who wrote how Carol entered the hearing in a wheelchair. She looked straight ahead and never back at her family behind her. Her attorney, Stephen Allen, sat beside her.
While Carol responded to questions in a quiet voice, Rudy broke down into tears.
Allen made a statement after the hearing, telling the media that Rudy stood by his wife and thanked the community for their support.
“Lastly, we want to draw attention to the issue of postpartum depression and psychosis,” Allen said. “More needs to be done to diagnose this disorder.”
He noted that Carol felt remorse for her actions but didn’t confirm at that time whether Carol’s attorneys would definitively use postpartum depression as a defense strategy.
“If that’s what the medical diagnosis says, then that’s probably where we’re headed,” Allen remarked.
Carol’s defense team had, indeed, brought up concerns about her competency to stand trial. According to court documents, Carol “rambled throughout the hearing, asking for her family and her children. She was eventually removed screaming from the courtroom.”
The court appointed psychiatrist Dr. Risa Grand to evaluate Carol. After assessing her, Grand diagnosed Carol with “major depressive with peri-partum onset and personality traits highly suggestive of Borderline Personality Disorder.”
In plain terms, the National Alliance of Mental Health (NAMI) defines “major depressive with peripartum onset” as postpartum depression, while Grand hinted that Carol may have also been suffering from a personality disorder.
Dr. Grand noted that Carol was prescribed the antipsychotic medication, Seroquel. She increased Carol’s dosage of the medication after her outburst in the courtroom. Carol also received an intramuscular injection of Haldol, another antipsychotic.
Dr. Grand indicated that perhaps the BPD could contribute to the psychotic episodes Carol allegedly had. She noted, as per court documents, that those with BPD “may experience brief para-psychotic episodes.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, BPD is a mental health condition in which the patient has an intense fear of abandonment and trouble regulating their emotions, especially anger. They have issues maintaining stable relationships and can be impulsive in nature. Moods and behaviors can change rapidly, especially when stressed and interacting with other people.
Dr. Grand revealed that Carol had denied her medications the night before the courtroom outburst. Nonetheless, the psychiatrist determined that Carol, now medicated, was competent to stand trial. The court also deemed her so, too.
It would be 2015 before Carol’s trial saw the inside of a courtroom. The week before it started, Carol opted to have Judge Ricardo Ocampo decide her fate instead of a jury.
The Sanity Phase
Dr. Grand was not the first psychiatrist to have assessed Carol. In the days immediately following the murders, Dr. Anil Sharma had also spoken with Carol in the hospital and diagnosed her with “major depression, severe, recurrent, with psychotic features,” according to court documents.
Another psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Choi, also talked to Carol in those days, and found her to be “very confused” and with an impaired thought process. His diagnosis was a “psychotic disorder not otherwise specified.” This, he said, is an “umbrella diagnosis that… encompasses any sort of psychiatric disorder… where the person is not in touch with reality.”
The psychiatrist who treated Carol while she was in prison awaiting trial, Dr. Torang Sepah, diagnosed her with a “mood disorder not otherwise specified” while “working on identifying it as a major depressive disorder with psychotic features with peripartum onset.”
It appears mental health professionals could agree she suffered from psychosis and postpartum depression, but couldn’t determine the true root of it. Dr. Sepah continued Carol’s prescription of antipsychotics.
Finally, Dr. Diana Barnes interviewed Carol. Dr. Barnes, according to court documents, is a therapist and psychologist who specializes in postpartum psychosis. She interviewed Carol three times, during which Carol told her she had been molested multiple times and had started hearing voices when she was five years old. Carol claimed that on the day of the murders, she experienced visual and auditory hallucinations telling her to kill her children. She didn’t remember killing her children; only stabbing herself.
This is the first time we hear Carol say she experienced hallucinations of any kind. She never told this to Martindale, the officer who interrogated her.
When all was said and done, Dr. Barnes came to a similar conclusion as the other psychiatrists when she diagnosed Carol with major depressive disorder with psychotic and catatonic features and peripartum onset. Dr. Barnes added that she believed Carol was psychotic at the time she killed her kids and did so in an act of Altruistic Filicide. Dr. Barnes concluded that Carol didn’t know what she was doing at the time of murders or that it was wrong.
Only one psychiatrist determined that Carol didn’t have what he called a “major mental disorder,” but that “there were times she may have been mildly depressed.” Dr. Gordon Plotkin, the only psychiatrist hired by the prosecution, “concluded Coronado understood the nature and quality of her acts at the time of the crimes.”
Ultimately, the court determined that Carol was sane when she committed the crimes. The prosecution decided not to seek the death penalty against her, leaving Carol to face a life sentence should she be convicted.
Defense vs Prosecution: Premeditated murders or a psychotic impulse?
Stephen Allen and his team not only brought up their belief that Carol suffered from postpartum depression when she murdered her kids, according to the LA Daily News, but pointed to her statement that she had been sexually abused.
“She was humiliated, tortured and even gang-raped,” Allen told the court.
Allen also had on his side the fact that out of the five mental health experts who evaluated Carol, the only one who didn’t diagnose her with some form of psychosis was the one hired by the prosecution.
The prosecution, in court documents, argued that “a defendant may suffer from a diagnosable mental illness without being legally insane,” which is also a valid point.
Not everyone who has a mental illness becomes a murderer. Not everyone with a mental illness is viably insane.
“Insanity is determined by whether a defendant was able to understand the nature of his actions or distinguish right from wrong at the time of the crime,” the documents state.
However, the defense criticized Dr. Plotkin’s conclusion because he spoke with Carol eight months after the crime had occurred. With that time lapse, there is no way way Dr. Plotkin could determine what Carol’s state of mind was at the time of the murders. Nor did he support his conclusions with any other explanation in opposition to the other experts.
The prosecution pointed out that in the hours following the murders, Carol knew “a knife was a knife” and knew she stabbed her children. She also confronted her mother and husband after the murders, and asked Martindale during the police interrogation for a deal.
Deputy District Attorney Emily Spear described the family’s destitute living conditions the children endured while their parents’ marriage fell to shambles. She even played a recording of an argument between Carol and Rudy in which he said he wanted a divorce.
Spear speculated that the argument may have caused Carol to snap, but also showed photos of the excrement-covered bathroom from that day and suggested the mess could also have led Carol to murdering the kids.
Court documents from the trial also note that over the years, Carol would get fed up with Rudy, who scolded her for not cleaning the house efficiently. About a year before the murders, Carol went to stay with her sister for a few days.
About ten days before the deaths, Carol told her mother that Rudy wanted a divorce. This, atop of everything else, is what the prosecution claimed pushed Carol over the edge.
Spear went as far to say Carol may have been faking symptoms of postpartum psychosis, as the symptoms are so easy to find on the Internet. But no evidence was reported to have been shown of any search histories on the subject.
Dr. Barnes testified the crosses drawn on the children and Carol arranging the kids on the bed, with her laying across the top in a cross formation, led the psychiatrist to stand by her conclusion that Carol committed an Altruistic Filicide, according to the Daily Breeze.
“That all suggests to me she was sending these children to heaven,” Dr. Barnes said.
In Dr. Barnes’ findings to which she testified in court, she said on the day of the murders, Carol claimed to hear voices telling her to “Get it over with” and “Do it. Do it now.” Carol also said she saw orange and red flashes of light. Dr. Barnes admitted the voices could have been telling her to do anything, such as the dishes, but it nonetheless drove her behaviors that day.
Carol told Dr. Barnes that she had been sexually assaulted at just five years old. She also told the psychiatrist that her father was an alcoholic, a drug addict, and a drug dealer. Because of him, she wound up living with her grandparents because he was in and out of prison and the family lost their home in 1999.
During her child births, Carol claimed she heard voices and underwent experiences where she felt as thought she left her body.
After her third child, Carol said the voices got worse because she never slept.
Carol’s own doctor, who saw her a week before the murders, testified that he saw no warning signs at that appointment. She appeared jovial and asked him if he could write a note so she could return to work as an X-ray technician.
This doctor questioned her on who would care for the children and didn’t provide the note.
I think this is an important moment for Carol. She had high hopes of returning to work and finding more financial stability — perhaps this was going to be her way of getting out of the marriage with the ability to support herself, or she viewed this as a way of helping and fixing her marriage. Not getting that note could have been the down slide into her deteriorating mental state. Just because she wasn’t psychotic at the doctor’s appointment, doesn’t mean she wasn’t six days later.
This same doctor also said he saw Carol six weeks after she gave birth to her youngest child and she seemed fine. That first six weeks is the danger zone for postpartum depression and psychosis, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Like anyone else with mental illnesses, women with postpartum have good days and bad days.
Besides, why else would four other psychiatrists diagnose her with some sort of psychosis?
Conviction and sentencing
In November 2015, the judge convicted Carol Caronado of three counts of first-degree murder, according to CBS. In the sentencing phase, the judge determined that she was sane at the time of the murders, and sentenced her to prison instead of a mental health facility.
She was acquitted of the attempted murder charge.
Instead of receiving treatment in a facility, Carol will spend the rest of her life behind bars. ABC 7 reported that a judge decided on Feb. 1, 2016 that she would serve three life sentences without the possibility of parole.
For Stephen Allen, he had to face the fact that his client, instead of receiving treatment in a facility, would have to do so within a state prison.
“I think there was a lot of evidence to show that she was in fact suffering, and there was no resources or means to see and go from there. They just didn’t know what to do,” he said following the sentencing.
The Daily Breeze reported that he intended to file for a new trial for his client, as well as an appeal.
In 2018, a three-justice panel California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld the conviction. The defense contended that there was not enough evidence to prove she premeditated the murders, but the panel disagreed.
“Evidence that she had used several different weapons during the attacks suggests she had time to reflect as she retrieved each weapon,” the ruling stated.
And so it would stand.
The aftermath of the tragedy
At the end of each story involving a mother who murders her children, regardless of the motive, she is either dead by her own hand or in prison. The kids are gone. Their lights snuffed out in the moments it took a father to leave the house for errands or go across the street or for a grandparent to show up. Twenty minutes. Thirty. In what many of us perceive to be a blink of an eye within a lifetime, three young, innocent lives were taken long before they ever even got to live.
Toys left abandoned on a bedroom floor. The silence where laughter or crying used to be in a home once full; now a mere haunted house of bloodshed and memories. Photos of another life too surreal to fathom happened before the tragedy. Pain. Heartbreak. The ripples of grief and devastation, reaching out across a family and community, left wondering how it came to this.
At the end of that story, a father is usually left standing, empty handed, to pick up the pieces.
One might think of Rusty Yates, who fled home from work that morning knowing his wife was ill but ten minutes was just too long. Andrea had drowned the kids and called 911 systematically before he ever arrived.
He and Andrea both failed to listen to doctors when they had their fifth and final child and the dangers of postpartum depression. But Rusty also stood by Andrea and stayed in touch with her after she was incarcerated at a mental facility, where she remains today.
Or perhaps we think of Patrick Clancy, after his wife, Lindsay, murdered their kids in the 25 minutes he was out of the house running errands. He came home to the kids strangled to death in the basement and Lindsay in the backyard, paralyzed from the waist down after jumping out of the second-story window.
While Lindsay is in the hospital and awaiting trial, Patrick has publicly stated he forgives her and hopes she finds peace. He knew she was sick. They had gone from one doctor to another, with a wide range of medications, and it simply became too much.
Maybe one’s mind drifts to the father at the center of this storm with Carol. Rudy Caronado may not have been the picture-perfect father, and had his wayward beliefs about how a household should run, but to his credit, he stood by Carol during the trial and spoke out about postpartum depression. He didn’t understand Carol’s behavior before the murders — and maybe Carol didn’t, either.
Still, Rudy has never publicly spoken a bitter word about her. During the trial, Rudy questioned his wife’s incarceration.
“She’s lost her head. She’s not the same. She’s still in a jumpsuit, she’s not even in the regular county blue. She’s still on the mental floor so if she’s really not mental why is she on the floor? Why is she in the same jumpsuit?” he said to ABC 7.
After the sentencing, Rudy still sounded confounded as to how and why this tragedy happened.
“The days leading up to what happened, there was signs. I didn’t know what to do, but I never knew nothing like to this extreme to happen. Never even expected nothing like this to ever happen, because she was not a violent person,” he said, once more speaking to ABC 7.
“It’s real hard to say forgive, but I am an understanding person and a realist and I realize this is a real disease,” he added.
Rudy told ABC 7 that over the Christmas before Carol’s sentencing, he had helped collect toys for children in hospitals, which helped ease his pain.
Somehow, there has to be a road on which to move on while keeping the memories of the children, the true victims of it all, close to the heart. Children don’t choose their parents or into what family they’re born, or where and what circumstances.
At the funeral for the girls, the Daily Breeze reported that Rudy released butterflies and doves into the air over three caskets: a light purple 5-foot long one for Sophia, pink and about 4-feet long for Yazmine, and just a small 3-foot long white casket for baby Xenia.
Roughly 250 people attended the funeral. At Green Hills Memorial Park, executives were so moved by the story and the family’s grief, they offered to provide free burials for the girls.
But one woman present for the funeral said it eloquently when she said that more people need to pay attention and be aware when things are happening in their communities, like back in the days when people knew their neighbors.
The acts of kindness at funerals and after the fact are meant to ease pain. The hundreds of people represent solidarity. These are things that need to happen before the tragedy, before a mother loses her mind and takes it out on her kids. Everyone from fathers who need to adjust their views, to neighbors, to friends, all need to take red flags as red flags and act on it. An intervention could save lives.
Mothers need safe spaces where they can discuss what is going on with their mental states. They need support. To leave them in the isolation and overwhelming life change that is motherhood is nothing short of reckless.
These tragedies are preventable, if only we see the signs.
Sources
ABC 7
Daily Breeze