FULL TEXT: “I have just drowned my three children,” said a
29-year-old mother, who stood in line to await her turn at the police complaint
desk.
“Lady, you didn’t make this up did you?” asked Sgt. Caesar
Bernal.
“I only wish I had,” replied Mrs. Rosa Pena.
Bernal quickly dispatched three squad cars and three ambulances to her small frame home, in a poorer section of San Antonio.
Bernal quickly dispatched three squad cars and three ambulances to her small frame home, in a poorer section of San Antonio.
Patrolmen found three small boys dead – David, 6, Alvin, 4, and Richard, 2.
A medical examiner said the youngsters apparently had been
drowned, as the mother told Bernal. One body lay in a hallway, the other two in
the kitchen.
Bernal said Mrs. Pena became hysterical under questioning
and when asked why she killed the children could only sob: “I didn’t want my
husband to have them.”
Mrs. Pena, booked at city jail for murder, was placed in a
hospital for treatment for shock. A police guard was ordered.
She told police that she and her husband had been having
domestic difficulties. She quoted Pena as saying if she left him, he would take the children
away from her.
“If I can’t have them, no one can,” she declared.
Police were trying to locate the father, Alfonso Pena, who
works at Kelly Air Force Base. His wife said they had been married nine years.
Bernal said she related this sequence of events:
She had started bathing the youngest, Rickie, and the
eldest, David, kept asking to take his bath.
To quiet David, she handed a bar of soap through the door,
reclosed it, and drowned Rickie.
She admitted David and also drowned him while Alvin was knocking at the
door. Then, in turn, she thrust the third child into the water and held him
until his struggles ceased.
The mother next drank what she thought was poison from a
bottle but it had no apparent effect.
After about an hour she went to the police station. She
waited nearly five minutes while the sergeant heard complaints from others
ahead of Mrs. Pena.
[“San Antonio Woman, 24, Drowns 3 Children; ‘I Didn’t Want
My Husband To Have Them,’ She Tells Police,” The Titusville Herald (Pa.), Aug.
18, 1958, p. 1]
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