A mother allegedly strangled her three children and then committed suicide by hanging herself.
Sonia Loja, 36, killed her three children — Jonael Panjon, 5, Joselyn Panjon, 10, and Junior Panjon, 12 — in a house from which she also ran a daycare center, police said Thursday.
Police responded to a call for a welfare check at the Whaley Street home in Danbury, Connecticut, around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and found the four family members dead. The children’s bodies were in the house, the mother’s in a shed in the backyard.
“The children all appear to have died of strangulation, and the presumed cause of death of the mother is asphyxiation by hanging,” said Detective Captain Mark Williams.
Pending an official autopsy, preliminary findings indicate that Ms Loja strangled her three children before committing suicide. However, this is still an active investigation.’
Loja and the children lived in the house with two other adults who were not there when the police arrived.
The bodies were discovered by a man who was crying and distraught.
Their autopsies were to be performed Thursday morning.
Loja has apparently told parents not to take their children to daycare on Wednesday.
“A man came to drop off his child and she came to the door and said, ‘No, sorry, I can’t babysit him today,'” Loja’s neighbor Elvis Español said. The New York Post on Thursday.
“She explained that she’d called the rest, all the other parents of the kids she saw, and she couldn’t get a hold of one to tell them not to come that day.”
Mayor Dean Esposito called it a “truly terrible event” and said mental health care would be offered in the city and public schools.
“Our community mourns the innocent lives taken from us,” Esposito said. “We’ll get through this together.”
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