Karin Ziolkowskii, a mom from Connecticut, was found guilty of killing her son, Elijah Ziolkowski, then setting their house on fire.
But just two days before the dreadful murder, she tweeted: “Why did I have a child?”
Results of the medical examiner’s autopsy indicated that Elijah had a lethal quantity of antihistamine diphenhydramine in his body – which can be found in medications such as Benadryl.
According to the medical examiner, the eight-year-old was already dead even before the house was burned.
Elijah’s death was declared as a homicide and the case of death was asphyxiation and acute intoxication, according to the Chief Medical Examiner’s office.
Cryptic social media posts killing
The Meriden Police Department looked into the mother’s social media posts to find clues as to why she did what she did and the cops were shocked by what they found.
Detectives found Ziolkowski tweeted the terms ‘fire extinguisher’ and ‘devil’s playground’, as well as ‘#takethatasyouwill.’ One day after, she tweeted the phrase ’empty promises,’ and ‘#takethatasyouwill.’
Most of all, officers became more distressed by her tweet asking – “Why did I have a child?”
The murder took place in 2016, and she was arrested in October 2017. The State’s Attorney Doyle, however, refused to comment on why it took so long for the case to come to trial and was decided only this year.
Mother/father murderers?
In August this year, a 25-year-old mother confessed to strangling her seven-year-old daughter.
Over four days in September, three children in Louisiana were killed by their parents in unrelated incidents. Lanaya Cardwell was charged with punching and killing her 2-year-old daughter, and Cardwell’s boyfriend, Phillip Garder, was accused of dumping the toddler’s body in a remote area. Ureka Black, 32, was accused of throwing her 10-month-old and 5-year-old sons off a bridge, killing the younger one. And Jake Guidry, 26, admitted to killing his 11-month-old baby by hitting the child “too hard.”
Then in October, another mother purportedly confessed to purposely killing her 5-year-old daughter before taking her to the hospital where her body was found partly draped in plastic and mesh bags.
And there was Matthew Coleman who was charged with killing 2 toddlers to “save the world.” He killed them with a spearfishing gun and then told authorities that the children were controlled by a “serpent DNA” and were “going to grow into monsters.”
Why a mom kills
Martha Smithey, an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at Tech University, Texas says, “Almost every story of maternal infanticide starts with ‘the baby wouldn’t stop crying,’ but the story is more than just bad or mentally ill mothers who lethally assault their baby…… The story is about how hard it is to be a good mother in a society where women are expected to raise their children in their spare time and with their spare change.”
Bringing home her point, Smithey added, “There is a lot of research on how our society expects child rearing to be the responsibility of the mother with little or no social support. She must earn an income that is much lower than men’s, at the same time making sure the home and her mothering is good. It’s a big imbalance with which many women struggle, and the circumstances are beyond her control, yet we tell women that a good woman is the one who can ‘do it all.’ The ‘do it all’ model has contributed to all sorts of problems for women and mothers – mainly, it is unrealistic and no one can live up to it.”
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