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| This photo provided by the Logan County Jail shows Brittany Pilkington, who calmly called 911 to report her baby son wasn't breathing on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015, and then hours later confessed to killing him and her two other young sons over the past several months, police said. Pilkington was charged with three counts of murder and was jailed Tuesday, said police in Bellefontaine, Ohio. |
BELLEFONTAINE,
Ohio (AP) -- A woman calmly called 911 to report her baby son wasn't
breathing on Tuesday and then hours later confessed to killing him and
her two other young sons over the past several months, police said.
Brittany
Pilkington was charged with three counts of murder and was jailed
Tuesday, said police in Bellefontaine, about 60 miles northwest of
Columbus.
Pilkington, who's 23 years old, is
accused in Tuesday's death of 3-month-old Noah Pilkington and in the
deaths of 4-year-old Gavin Pilkington, who died in April, and
3-month-old Niall Pilkington, who died in July 2014. No working
telephone number for her home could be found, and no attorney
information was available for her.
Police said
officers went to the family's apartment on Tuesday morning after an
emergency call from the mother saying that Noah wasn't breathing. They
said she calmly answered a dispatcher's questions while the baby's sleep
apnea alarm beeped in the background. The baby was pronounced dead at a
hospital.
Authorities already were
investigating what happened to Niall and Gavin, whose causes of death
still hadn't been conclusively determined. In each of those cases, their
father, Joseph Pilkington, found them unresponsive when he got home
from work.
"Our son's not breathing," Brittany
Pilkington said meekly to a dispatcher when she called police on April 6
as her husband frantically gave Gavin chest compressions. "He's turning
white."
Joseph and Brittany Pilkington were
cooperative on Tuesday, police said. She eventually told detectives that
she killed all three children, police said, but no other details of
officers' discussions with her were released.
"The
tragic deaths of Niall, Gavin and Noah leave a pit in our stomachs
today," police Chief Brandon K. Standley said in a statement. "Our
condolences go out to the remaining family members who have supported
this family through a very difficult 13 months."
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is assisting local authorities.
