SHARE
COPY LINK
SIGTUNA CHILD MURDERS

CHILD MURDER

‘We were all supposed to die’: mother

The trial against the 31-year-old mother charged with murdering her two sons by pushing them in the water and watching them drown opened in Sweden on Wednesday.

'We were all supposed to die': mother

The mother has admitted to having caused their death.

“Tevin didn’t scream but Elias screamed for a long time. It was loud and he shouted ‘no, no, no’,” the mother revealed during interrogations, according to daily Aftonbladet.

4-year-old Elias and 8-year-old Tevin were found dead in the water near the Munkholmen swimming area in Sigtuna in late September. Suspicions were soon directed toward the boys’ 31-year-old mother.

After first denying she had killed the boys, the mother later admitted to pushing her kids into the water and watching them drown. In interrogation she revealed that she had meant to drown herself as well.

“We were all supposed to die,” said the woman, according to the paper.

But instead, she stood and watched and later called the 4-year-old’s father, saying that “something horrible” had happened to the two boys.

The father reported both boys missing after the telephone call from the mother, which gave him a feeling that “all was not right”.

Prior to drowning her kids the mother had been becoming increasingly unstable and was experiencing severe financial problems.

“I felt I couldn’t take care of them. That it would be easier if we all died. I had let them down. I had lost all hope of taking care of them,” said the woman when questioned by police, according to the paper.

On September 18th she took them both out on a jetty to end their lives. After finding the waters too shallow at first, she told them they were going home but instead continued on to a second pier.

Well there, she took off the children’s clothes and pushed her two boys in. Neither could swim.

“I just stood there and cried. The idea was that I would jump in too, but I was too scared,” she said, according to the paper.

According to the woman, her younger son screamed for a few minutes as he struggled in the water, while the 8-year-old was silent.

“He did nothing. Said nothing. I think he died straight away,” the mother said, according to daily Expressen.

After watching her children drown, the woman went home and after changing went to a neighbour to telephone Elias’ father. She thought that heaven was a better place for the boys, she said according to the paper.

The mother is charged with the murder of her two sons. After undergoing a medical investigation, the mother has been found to be suffering from a serious mental condition.

Since her arrest she has been held at a secure psychiatric ward at Huddinge sjukhus, in southern Stockholm.

According to Expressen she has been treated with anti-depressants and has been under serious strain since admitted to the clinic.

The woman’s defence lawyer, Eva Möller, told the paper that her client is distraught about what has happened.

”She is terribly upset about what she has done,” Möller told the paper.

”I regret everything. I have killed my children and don’t know how I will be able to live,” said the woman during the trial, according to Expressen.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

VIKING

Half of Viking city of Sigtuna were immigrants: study

No fewer than half the population of the Viking town of Sigtuna were immigrants, a new genetic analysis of human remains from the 10th to the 12th century has discovered.

Half of Viking city of Sigtuna were immigrants: study
An 11th century skeleton found in Sigtuna. Photo: Stockholm University
While rough half of the 38 people whose bones and teeth were genetically tested grew up in or around the nearby Lake Mälaren area, the other half came from as far away as Ukraine, Lithuania, northern Germany, the British Isles, and parts of central Europe, as well as from southern Sweden, Norway and Denmark. 
 
“It was a sort of Viking Age Scandinavian Shanghai or London,” Anders Götherström, Professor of Molecular Archeology at Stockholm University, told the TT newswire. “Anyone who wanted to do something, to work their way up in the church or in politics were first forced to come to Sigtuna.” 
 
Now a picturesque lakeside town with a well-known private boarding school, Sigtuna was one of Sweden’s first cities, founded in 980AD by the country’s first Christian king Olof Skötkonung. 
 
It soon grew into a major settlement of around 10,000 people, roughly the same population as Anglo-Saxon London. 
 
The study, the largest of its kind so far carried out in Sweden, combined DNA analysis and strontium analysis of teeth to build a detailed picture of where the people had come from. 
 
The results have been published in an article in Current Biology,  Genomic and Strontium Isotope Variation Reveal Immigration Patterns in a Viking Age Town
 
Maja Krzewinska, the researcher at Stockholm University who was the study's primary author, said that it showed that Vikings had not only been emigrants and invaders. 
 
“We're used to thinking of the Vikings as a travelling kind, and can easily picture the school books with maps and arrows pointing out from Scandinavia, as far as Turkey and America, but not so much in the other direction,” she said in a press release issued by the university. 
 
The project is part of the ATLAS-project which plans to use ‘deep-sequence analysis’ to shine light on the demographic history of Sweden. 
 
“I especially like that we find second-generation immigrants among the buried,” Götherström, one of the project’s leaders, said in the release. “That kind of migratory information has never been encountered before as far as I know.” 
 
The study found that approximately 70 per cent of the female population were immigrants, and about 44 per cent of the men.
 
Götherström told TT that the Atlas project underlined the fact that, genetically, there was no such thing as an ethnic Swede. 
 
“The Swede doesn't exist genetically,” he said, “We've pieced ourselves together from parts taken from the whole world, and the more we study this genetically, the more we see that people have been moving around the place the whole time.” 
 
 
SHOW COMMENTS