Chloe Menager admitted to killing her one-year-old boy

Mar 26, 2014 15:08 GMT  ·  By

A 27-year-old French woman admitted in a Dallas, Texas courtroom to drowning her one-year-old son in a bathtub in September 2012, and now faces life in prison.

Chloe Menager has been convicted by jurors of killing her son Elijahu Perez by holding him under water until he drowned. Police officers who arrived at the woman’s house found the little boy on a bed, inside the apartment. He was dead and still wet.

According to court records, the child's father, Pablo Perez, flagged down a police squad and guided them to the couple’s apartment in the 4300 block of Wyoming St., where they found the baby’s body.

Menager was found in wet, bloodstained clothes, talking on the phone and crying. She reportedly told Dallas Fire-Rescue personnel that she had killed her son. The woman confessed to the police that she had held the baby underwater, causing his death.

After drowning her son, Menager also tried to kill herself by slashing her left wrist with a dull knife.

However, in a jailhouse interview shortly after her arrest, Menager said, “I was a good mother, but they don’t see it that way.”

Moreover, the woman claimed she had suffered from depression and had been tormented by “demons” because of her past sins, as reported by Daily Mail. On her religiously critic interviews, she said she didn't want people to blame her actions on her strong Jewish faith and claimed the evil spirits were to blame for her actions, saying that they made her take her child’s life.

“It's kind of like that but I can't say it that way because it's really hard, and it's hard to explain because people are not going to want to understand. But I know that people that I know and people that understand all those teachings, I know they are going to understand,” she said.

Along with her husband, Pablo Perez, Menager had been attending a small Messianic Jewish Church in Oak Cliff, called Am-Segulah Linaje Escogido (which translates to Treasured Nation Chosen Lineage).

Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys made public statements about the case. The jury found her guilty of drowning her son on Tuesday.

The woman was originally charged with capital murder, but the charge was subsequently reduced to first-degree murder.

Menager came from France to Dallas 12 years ago and met her husband three years before the tragic incident, when she saw him playing guitar in a band.