Julie Piercey entered her daughter’s 223rd Street house May 20, not expecting the horror she was about to stumble upon. Finding no one in the living room, she walked toward the bedroom, calling out her daughter’s name, “Carol?”

“Oh my God, she came out that room flinging her hand, open hand toward the floor and saying, ‘Mom, what are you doing here?’ ’’ Piercey told a Los Angeles County grand jury last month. “I looked at her and I said, ‘Carol, Mom came to see if you’re OK.’ ”

Thirty-year-old Carol Coronado was naked.

“I said, ‘Carol, Mom came to see if you were OK’ and I hugged her. And I go, ‘How was your day?’ Piercey said. “She just shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘It was a bad day, Mom.’ ”

In the next room of the house in the unincorporated West Carson area, Piercey would quickly find her three grandchildren lying in a bloody mess on the bed, lined up in order of their ages, each dead from stab wounds, according to a transcript of the Sept. 22 county grand jury proceeding.

Piercey, Coronado’s husband, Rudy, two detectives and two deputy medical examiners who performed autopsies on the children testified during the hearing in downtown Los Angeles. The grand jury — a panel of 24 people — indicted Coronado on three counts of capital murder with the special circumstance allegation she committed multiple murders. Coronado could potentially face spending the rest of her life in prison with no chance of release, or the death penalty if prosecutors choose that path.

She also is charged with attempting to kill her mother.

Coronado pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity to the charges Sept. 29. She is scheduled for a pretrial hearing Friday at the Compton courthouse. Coronado’s attorney, Stephen Allen, said she suffered from postpartum depression at the time of the killings and plans to present evidence of it at her trial.

“It’s going to be a long battle, but we will get there eventually,” Allen said.

The grand jury transcript, however, reveals how prosecutors believe the killings were premeditated, committed by Coronado to get back at her husband because he planned to divorce her and because he neglected to help care for the three children.

“Every single one of those girls had multiple cuts to their neck,” Deputy District Attorney Emily Spear told the jury. “Every single time she cut those little girls, she had time to stop, time to reflect, time to think about what she was doing, time to continue killing her little girls.”

The testimony revealed:

• Coronado requested a “deal” when a detective asked her if she killed her children “to get back at your husband in some way.” Coronado also told detectives she was molested as a child.

• The dead bodies were neatly arranged — the youngest girl, Xenia, 3 month old, on the left; Yazmine, 16 months, in the center; and Sophia, 2, on the right.

• An autopsy showed Yazmine died of stab wounds to the right side of her neck and chest, and had cuts on the back of her hands, an indication she tried to fend off the attack. A blunt-force injury revealed she was hit in the head with a claw hammer, which was found on the bed.

• Sophia died of wounds to the right side of her neck and chest, and Xenia from a cut to the right side of her neck. A cross made of blood was drawn on Sophia’s chest.

• Detectives found three knives and a scissors laid out on a table near the bed. Another knife was on the floor. Piercey took the fifth knife from Coronado’s hand and dropped it on the ground outside the house.

• Piercey and Rudy Coronado downplayed questions into whether he wanted to divorce Coronado, and Piercey said her daughter did not lunge at her with a knife, an allegation investigators insist she made initially. Rudy Coronado, in fact, testified that he did not want to say anything against his wife.

“He’s hanging at her side,” Allen, the defense attorney, said in an interview.

Spear declined to say why prosecutors convened the grand jury rather than going through the routine preliminary hearing process. Allen said he was not made aware of the proceeding until it was over. Had Rudy Coronado told him he was subpoenaed, Allen would have advised him to get his own attorney, who could have argued he did not have to testify against his wife.

“It’s frustrating for everybody,” Allen said. “That’s how their office wanted to proceed.”

Defense attorneys do not take part in grand jury proceedings, so no evidence of Carol Coronado’s alleged mental condition was submitted.

“I’m here against my will,” Rudy Coronado said when he took the stand. “I was told if I do not show up today, I would be locked up indefinitely, so I’m here against my will, ma’am. … I just wouldn’t like to say anything incriminating against my wife.”

The husband testified he and his wife had a good relationship, one with “ups and downs.” He denied asking his wife for a divorce, and said she began acting “differently” in May.

“I’m learning more that it’s because of the postpartum, which I never had a clue,” he said. “Every relationship, none is perfect — yours, your neighbors, nobody’s relationship is perfect. Everyone has arguments, especially when a woman has postpartum depression and psychosis.”

Rudy Coronado, who sells auto parts at Alpine Village swap meets for a living, said he gave his wife $100 that morning “to do what she had to do,” including getting gas. He met her later at a McDonald’s near their home because she ran out of gas.

“I was a little agitated on how she was acting because she, she just didn’t seem there,” Rudy Coronado said. “She just didn’t seem like Carol. She seemed different, like I don’t know how to explain it. … She was there physically, she wasn’t there mentally.”

Rudy Coronado found his wife in the car in the McDonald’s parking lot. The girls were eating in the back seat and smelled like they needed a diaper change, so he suggested she drive them home. When Rudy Coronado asked her what was wrong, his wife rambled. She told him to take the girls home himself, he testified.

Rudy Coronado said he raised his voice as he became agitated, drove them to fill his wife’s gas tank and told her to take the children home. He departed first, but returned home after she did.

“I came in to grab some money, and I seen my daughter running around the house and naked, and she had poop all over her body,” he testified. “There was a big old puddle of poop in the living room, and I remember telling Carol, ‘Carol, what’s going on? What’s happening?’ She just kept saying that she’s tired and her eyes were like out, completely out of it. Kept saying she was tired. ‘I’m tired. I’m tired.’ ”

The husband walked outside to work on his truck and called Piercey, telling her his wife was “acting weird” and she needed to come over. Piercey arrived 30 minutes later.

Earlier that day, Carol Coronado — who once worked for a doctor in Lynwood — had called her mother, who frequently went over to help her out with dishes and laundry on weekends while her husband worked.

“She wasn’t getting help with the children,” the mother said.

But that morning, Piercey told her daughter she couldn’t help.

“She was very scared, very upset that morning, and I told her, ‘Sorry, baby, I can’t make it this morning, call your sisters. And she goes, ‘Well, they work, too, Mom, what can they do?’ ”

When Piercey arrived at the house that afternoon, Rudy Coronado was across the street, underneath his truck. Piercey went inside the house, found her daughter naked, glanced at the bedroom and saw the girls on the bed. Piercey commented that the girls were sleeping.

“She didn’t respond to me,” Piercey recalled. “Then I looked again a little closer. I go, ‘Oh, that’s red on Sophia’s cheek. Um, is this a sunburn?’

“And then I seen a knife come up. It pointed that way, never pointed toward me, but pointed in that direction, and I go, ‘Oh hell no,’ and I grabbed her wrist. And she put her wrist down, and I took that knife easy, real easy. There was no resistance.”

Piercey described the weapon as a “big butcher knife,” but denied that her daughter lunged at her as prosecutors claim.

“She lowered her wrist, and I took the knife from her, and then I walked into the living room and she kept calling me, ‘Mom, Mom’ and tapping my shoulder, ‘Mom, Mom.’ I said, ‘Not now, Carol, not now.’ ”

Piercey said she stood in the living room for a minute, trying to figure out what to do. Outside, Rudy Coronado heard his mother-in-law’s “funny scream.” Piercey said she ran out of the house, dropped the knife on the driveway and yelled, “Rudy, she killed the girls.”

“I ran across the street,” the husband said. “She’s like, ‘Don’t go in there, don’t go in there.’ ”

Carol Coronado ran into the bedroom and slammed the door when Piercey and Rudy Coronado entered the house. Rudy Coronado kicked the door open.

Carol Coronado retreated and jumped on the bed. She knelt on the mattress, putting her hands on the girls as if she was protecting them, Piercey said.

“We just looked at her in amazement,” the mother said.

Rudy Coronado said he saw his daughters lined up on the bed. He said he yelled, “Carol, what did you do?”

“She’s like, ‘Get away, get away,’ ” the father recalled. “She jumped off the bed and came toward me. Then she went back onto the bed to where they were at and she started stabbing herself. She raised her left breast and placed the knife like she was looking where she placed the knife at, and I didn’t try to stop her.”

Carol Coronado shoved the knife into her own body.

“Her eyes looked so different,” the husband recalled. “She said she loved me and then she stabbed herself. I told her ‘I love you, too, Carol. What did you do?’ ’’

Carol Coronado’s mother then ran outside and called police. Sheriff’s Sgt. Timothy Cain found the knives, scissors and hammer, and said the bathroom was smeared with feces. He noticed the cross drawn in blood on Sophia’s chest.

Homicide Sgt. Robert Martindale said he questioned Carol Coronado twice at Torrance Memorial Medical Center, where she was treated for the deep chest wound. Martindale said Coronado told him she was molested as a child.

He said he asked her several times, “What happened to your daughters?”

“She said, ‘I had to do it. I didn’t mean to do it,’ ” Martindale said. “I asked her ‘What were you trying to do? Were you taking the kids to heaven?’ She said, ‘Is that a bad thing?’ ”

Carol Coronado described her relationship with her husband as loving, but said they suffered financially and “at certain points she felt like she was taken advantage of,” Martindale said.

“She was a full-time mom with very little help from Rudy. That’s what she described,” Martindale said.

The detective said he asked her, “Did you kill the kids to get back at your husband in some way?”

“I said if that’s the case, tell me if that’s true,” Martindale continued. “And she said, which took me by surprise, ‘If that’s true, can I get a deal?’ ”

At other points in the questioning, Coronado said she and her husband did not have enough money to pay the bills or buy clothes.

“Two other times she goes, ‘I didn’t mean to do it, sir,’ ” Martindale said.

He said he felt compassion for Coronado and touched her hand to calm her down. He said she responded, ‘I just want to be loved.’ ”