BY WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 2016

Honey-Nut Cheerios. They were his favorite. “The Cheerios with the bee!” Lisette Bamenga’s face brightens as she recalls how much her son Kenny loved Honey-Nut Cheerios, how she and her little boy used to dance and sing together about the Cheerios with the bee. Now, Bamenga says, it hurts when a commercial for the cereal comes on the television at the women’s facility at Rikers Island, where she has spent nearly four years of her life. It pains her to see the cheerful bee zipping around the screen, because the memory of Kenny’s smiling face is still so vivid. Then her mind races back to that fateful day, the day she took the life of her son. Here’s what we know for certain about the events of July 5, 2012: At some point after 6 p.m., Bamenga, then a 29-year-old resident of the Bronx, killed 4-year-old Kenny and her 3-month-old daughter Violette. She drowned the two children in a bathtub, and autopsies determined that both had ingested methanol, a toxic ingredient found in windshield-wiper fluid.

Bamenga also cut her own wrists and drank a significant quantity of wiper fluid mixed into grape juice. Then she taped up the windows of the apartment and turned on the gas. The firefighters who responded to reports of a gas odor at 1500 Noble Avenue in Parkchester, where she lived with the kids and their father, NYPD rookie Trevor Noel, found her lying unconscious on the kitchen floor alongside Kenny and Violette, wearing a T-shirt with the words “Do not resuscitate” scrawled on it. First responders noted that rigor mortis had already begun to set in on Kenny; they tried to revive Violette, but the baby was pronounced dead on arrival at Jacobi Medical Center. Lisette Bamenga survived. Here’s what we cannot — and may never — know for sure: Exactly what happened inside Lisette Bamenga’s mind after she returned home from picking up the children at daycare and before the arrival of the FDNY. She herself has offered only a fragmented account over the days, months and years since that horrible night. On the stand at her trial, which took place over three weeks this spring, she said she could not remember much of the evening. Investigators pieced together a patchwork narrative from the physical evidence at the scene: the notes she printed out, one for her own parents and one for the children’s father, whom she called “a disgrace to manhood,” adding, ”I am taking my precious children to a world where liying and deception does not exist” (sic); the half-emptied bottle of wiper fluid, purchased that afternoon at a local Pep Boys; the well-worn Bible, found next to a knife near the stove; the bathtub, filled with water, which had toys and fecal matter floating in it. We also know that in the early afternoon of July 4, through monitoring software she had installed on Noel’s computer, Bamenga learned that he had another child with a woman named Fiona, in Spain.

Via Facebook MAMA’S BOY Bamenga with her son Kenny; her supporters say she was a loving mother whose children were the center of her life.

The prosecution contended that Bamenga plotted and executed the killings as cold-blooded revenge against Noel for his infidelity. Her defense team countered that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was not capable of controlling her actions. What remains unexplained — and perhaps inexplicable — to those who know her: How could this ever have happened? Lisette Bamenga was a teacher, a student, the hope and anchor of her high-achieving immigrant family. How could a bubbly, vivacious woman widely known to be a loving mother, who put her kids at the center of her life, had no history of abusing them and no criminal record, have woken up in an intensive-care unit on July 6 to the reality that Kenny and Violette were dead, and that she was the one who killed them?







If Bamenga had died, that would have been the end of the story, and the world would have gone on without her. But because she survived, the communities she was part of had to figure out how to go on with her. Many women who kill their children are abandoned by all who know them. But Bamenga’s case attracted a group of supporters that included not just her immediate family — her mother, father and younger brother, with whom she has always been very close — but also work colleagues, members of her church community and, perhaps most surprisingly, many of the parents whose 8-year-old children studied in Bamenga’s classroom just days before she killed her own kids.

“To have a community of people that’s willing to step forward and say, ‘This is not some evil monster.’ That’s just phenomenal.”

“From the beginning, I could not imagine she was in her normal state,” says Margarita Sánchez, a professor of modern languages at Wagner College, whose daughter was in Bamenga’s third-grade class and who has been one of her staunchest supporters. Sánchez and other parents connected Bamenga’s family with Margaret Spinelli, a clinical psychiatrist and professor at Columbia University who specializes in psychiatric disorders during pregnancy and postpartum. Spinelli and others recommended Michael Dowd, a veteran lawyer with experience in cases such as Bamenga’s, and ultimately, her parents chose to retain him. According to the defense, Bamenga had been living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and postpartum depression; she also had a strong family history of postpartum psychosis on both sides of her family. The day of the killing, Spinelli testified, she had a psychotic break that included hallucinations and hearing voices. The prosecution argued that Bamenga, far from finding herself in a deluded and irresponsible haze, acted calmly and deliberately — methodically researching murder and suicide methods on the Internet, buying materials to poison her children, and then going ahead with her plan despite having family and friends she could have reached out to for help. “It is unimaginable to us that a mother could do this,” Bronx assistant district attorney Nancy Borko said in her summation of the case. “Yet, Lisette Bamenga could and did. And the reason, we submit, that the reason is because she lost her exclusive hold on someone more dear to her than her children, or perhaps even more dear to her than her own life, Trevor Noel.”

Via Facebook (left); Debbie Egan-Chin/Daily News CLASS ACT Bamenga flashes the high-wattage smile that endeared her to her third-graders in the French-English program at PS 58 in Brooklyn.

To help pay for Bamenga’s defense, her supporters raised money at stoop sales and private parties, collecting many thousands of dollars. It was an exceptional situation, according to Teresa Twomey, an advocate for women with postpartum mental health issues who herself suffered from postpartum psychosis after her daughter was born. “That’s just phenomenal,” says Twomey, who made a full recovery. “To have a community of people that’s willing to step forward and say, ‘No, wait a minute, this person is not this evil monster that people would like to paint them as.’ I haven’t seen a lot of that happening in the past.” Once the trial started, nearly four years after the killing, Bamenga’s supporters filed in to fill the benches of the courtroom, day after day, in most cases traveling more than an hour to reach the Bronx. Bamenga had made the decision to go to trial only after prolonged plea negotiations; the final offer, of 20 years, included an admission of guilt that she refused to make. It was a risky choice: Bamenga stood accused of first-degree murder, a charge that could have resulted in a sentence of life without parole. Once they made the decision to forego a plea bargain, Bamenga’s defense team opted for a bench trial rather than a jury trial on the hope that a judge would be able to evaluate the psychiatric evidence supporting their arguments more fairly and dispassionately than a jury. After he reached a verdict, the judge would have sole power as well, within mandated guidelines, to set her sentence. That meant that in the end, the decision about Bamenga’s fate rested with one man: the Honorable Martin Marcus, a jurist with 26 years of experience on the bench. Marcus is a gray-haired, balding man who regards his courtroom over reading glasses with a sharp and attentive intelligence. It would be up to him alone to decide whether Lisette Bamenga was, as the defense asserted, “not responsible by mental disease or defect” for what she did, or whether she was, as the prosecution maintained, a calculating killer motivated by revenge.







According to Trevor Noel, the people who have stood by Bamenga after the killings are naive and ignorant of her true nature. “Those that supported her barely know the defendant no more than a year’s time,” (sic) he wrote in an email. “She acted a certain way toward me and acted completely different towards them. The defendant’s supporters would feel completely different if it were their children murdered.” Noel left the police department only a few months after the killings and moved to Miami Beach, a place that used to be a favorite getaway for him and Bamenga. Now he’s working as a security guard. “It’s a lot of depression,” he said at the trial. “I deal with it my own way. I work out a lot, I go to the beach. I do things that are not going to throttle up a lot of feelings.”

“No one knows the defendant better than I. She explicitly threatened to kill me if she ever found me in bed with another woman.”

He didn’t want to talk on the phone but sent several emails (edited for clarity) expressing his anger with the way that the case against Bamenga had been handled and his feeling that her true nature had not come out at the trial. “No one knows the defendant better than I,” he wrote. “She explicitly threatened to kill me if she ever found me in bed with another woman or that I had a child by someone, and would then plead insanity and get off, and she did. Since there are no police reports of assault, stalking or harassment, any claim of her hitting me, threatening me, or following me, these accusations are not taken into account. Being a man and being physically attacked by a woman is not taken seriously. The defendant downplayed her obsession for me and what she is willing to do if she ever found out if I had a child by another. This woman was obsessed with me. I was her possession.” The prosecution retained Stuart Kirschner, a forensic psychologist who frequently appears as an expert witness in court, to examine Bamenga. Kirschner examined her in January of 2014, at which time he diagnosed her with “an unspecified bipolar-related disorder with seasonal pattern and with peripartum onset.” The “seasonal” classification was related to a pattern Bamenga’s family had observed since adolescence. Starting in June every year, she would become hyper-energized, a tendency that earned her the nickname la fille du soleil, or “daughter of the sun.” Bamenga and her family, as well as Noel, testified to her erratic, impulsive behavior at such times. She would take trips to Europe on the spur of the moment, take on huge projects, and spend money with abandon; one time, she paid a photographer $1,000 to take pictures of Kenny in hopes he could have a modeling career. No one, before the killings, had ever thought that this might be the sign of a more serious underlying mental condition. On the stand, Kirschner dismissed the idea that she was incapable of stopping herself from doing what she did. “It was a calculated act where thought was involved every step of the way: how she was going to kill the children,” he said. “And she wasn’t in just a total frothing-of-mouth rage in which there was no thought and no concern about anything that was around her.” He also questioned Bamenga’s account of having hallucinations and hearing taunting voices on the day she killed her kids, pointing out that she had never reported hallucinations before or since that day. Regardless, Kirschner said, even people suffering from delusions can be held criminally responsible for their actions. “There’s no question in my mind that Miss Bamenga had the ability to form intent for the crimes for which she was charged.” In Noel’s view, the postpartum-psychosis defense was just a ploy, and the justice system is stacked against men. “These crimes against men and children perpetuated by women occur on a regular basis and do not get enough attention, nor are they taken seriously in our courts,” wrote Noel. “It is grossly underreported. Women will always get the benefit of the doubt in criminal and family court when the victims are men and children. Some way, somehow, the woman becomes the victim even when she is not. Will I get a slap on the wrist if I go on a murderous rampage?”

Michael Schwartz for Daily News; Danny Iudici SCENE OF THE CRIME Detectives remove evidence from Bamenga’s apartment (left); medical examiners take away the body of one of her children.







It’s a long way from 1500 Noble Avenue to the brownstone-lined streets of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, where Lisette Bamenga taught third grade in the prestigious bilingual French-English program at Public School 58. Every day during the school year, before what her friends and supporters frequently refer to as “the incident,” Bamenga made the draining commute, driving sometimes alone and sometimes with Kenny, whom she had enrolled in a bilingual preschool nearby in the hope of preparing him for entry to the school. Bamenga took a pay cut of $10,000 a year to transfer from a charter school in Bushwick to PS 58, in part because she wanted to give Kenny a chance at a bilingual education. Born in France to Congolese-immigrant parents, Bamenga had earned top grades in Paris schools before the family moved to the United States when she was a teenager. She became unerringly fluent in English while a student at Beacon, one of New York City’s most selective and competitive public high schools. She knew the advantages of being able to move easily between languages, and she wanted that for her son.

“The hardest part when I heard the story was, I trusted my child’s life to this woman.”

The cost of Kenny’s preschool, though, was a source of contention between her and Noel. He thought it was a waste of money to pay such pricey tuition, but Bamenga prevailed. Sometimes, after her son finished his school day, she would pick him up and bring him to PS 58 to sit and play while she finished her work. “Lisette was a great mom,” her colleague Marie Bouteillon testified at the trial. “He loved her so much.… She talked to him a lot, very warmly.… She was able to make him feel like school — well, our school — was another place where you just played.” Teaching at 58 was a demanding job. The parents were highly involved and expected a lot from the teachers. Bamenga fit in from the start. “Lisette always had a positive attitude, even though it was so much work,” Bouteillon testified. “She was always smiling. She just worked as hard as she could.” Bouteillon did notice that after Violette was born, toward the end of the school year, Lisette seemed to be struggling with the workload. Her appearance was less put-together as well. Later, the defense would present this as evidence of her postpartum depression, which she suffered after Kenny’s birth as well. When the news broke about what she had done on the night of July 5, the parents of many of her students, as well as others affiliated with the school, almost immediately started contacting each other online to figure out how to respond. Not everyone was supportive of Bamenga; some of the parents of her students were so upset by the nature of the crime that they asked to be removed from the group emails. But a significant number expressed interest in actively working to aid in her defense. PS 58 — and particularly the community served by the French program — is a certain kind of privileged enclave that is not uncommon in New York. The people whose children attend are, by and large, well-educated and comfortably middle-class, even affluent. Many of them come from France or elsewhere outside the United States. Their ranks include many artists and educators. They tend to be liberal and politically active. These are people who feel free to voice their concerns and expect to have their opinions respected. They live in a world that makes sense, and what Lisette Bamenga did made no sense to them.

Michael Schwartz for Daily News

“The hardest part when I heard the story was, I trusted my child’s life to this woman,” says Susan Moran, whose daughter had been suffering from severe anxiety shortly before she entered Bamenga’s class. “I gave her my complete trust because I felt she cared immediately. It was just the essence of who she is. She was able to handle my daughter’s situation and also handle me at the same time.” People who had worked with Bamenga also got connected to the support group over time, finding comfort in the idea that they were doing something to help a person whose life had taken an unimaginable turn. “There are these seminal points in your life where you look back and you recall everything,” says Evelyn Shoop, who worked with Bamenga at the charter school in Bushwick. Like many of the people I talked to, she remembered exactly where she was when she heard the news. “A friend of mine sent me a text message and said, ‘Have you heard about Lisette?’ and I said, ‘No, what happened?’ And she said, ‘She killed her kids.’ That’s just a crumple moment when you sort of fall down.” Shoop says that she had an immediate, visceral response to the news. “The thing that I find really interesting when I look back on it is that my first reaction was just love, like in capital letters,” she says. “That’s the only thing that we could do, that we just needed to love on Lisette as hard as we could, because clearly something terrible had happened. It was so heavy on my heart. It was just — I don’t know what it was, but I know that something really, really dark happened.” Once the school year started up again, Bamenga’s support group organized an informational meeting at the local public library about perinatal mental-health issues, which occur during pregnancy or after childbirth. They invited mental health and medical professionals including Molly Peryer, a licensed social worker whose son attended 58, although he was not in Bamenga’s class. Since 2006, Peryer has run the Brooklyn PPD Support Group, which she was inspired to start after she found herself in a severe depression following the birth of her first child. She explains that perinatal mental illness falls along a spectrum of severity, ranging from depression to full-blown psychosis. “If you have a perinatal disorder, it’s a combination — it’s hormonal, circumstantial, genetic,” she says. “Every woman is affected differently by hormonal changes.” Peryer says she never doubted that perinatal mental illness was at the root of Bamenga’s actions. “She was a teacher at PS 58,” she says, invoking the pride the school’s parents have in the education offered there. “This would never happen in a circumstance other than postpartum psychosis or some other postpartum disorder. To suggest anything else — that she was pissed and so she killed her kids — that’s ridiculous. To me that’s just ignorance.”







Postpartum depression affects about one in every seven women who give birth, but postpartum psychosis — characterized by delusions, hallucinations and paranoia — is much more rare. The most up-to-date estimates put the incidence at between one and two per 1,000 births, or .1%. That’s more common than it might sound, and about the same prevalence as Down syndrome. “Do you know any families with Down syndrome?” Twomey asks rhetorically. For me, the answer is yes. And I draw the implied conclusion. Of course, only a very few women of those very few women with PPP end up harming or killing their children or themselves. But as Twomey says, when it does happen it is a tragedy of unfathomable proportions for everyone involved. The horror can be compounded by the fact that many women return to normal after their bout with life-altering mental illness. “If you think about all the horrible things that can happen in your life,” she says, “unintentionally killing your child in that manner and being seen as a monster — and then having the somewhat bad fortune of later being sane — it’s one of the worst fates I can imagine.” She believes that the reflexive reaction most people have to stories like that of Bamenga’s — or Andrea Yates, who killed her five children in 2001 and was later found to be not guilty by reason of insanity — is an instinctive way to protect themselves. “It makes it so much easier to live with if we believe that this kind of thing cannot touch us,” Twomey says.”Because nobody in our family is ‘like that.’ ” For some of Bamenga’s colleagues, who knew her more closely than the parents of her students, the news that someone close to them had committed such an unspeakable crime remains difficult to cope with. Yvette Ferrara, who taught with Lisette for several years in Bushwick, says that her first reaction was disbelief. “It was one of those moments where I had to read that over and over and over again, because I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” she says. “I was like, this has to be a mistake, this can’t be Lisette Bamenga.” Bamenga had agreed to be a bridesmaid in Ferrara’s September wedding, and not long before, had accompanied the bride-to-be on a dress-shopping expedition. Ferrara’s fiancé had also taught with Bamenga, in a kindergarten classroom. “We saw Kenny grow up,” she says. “She brought him to school, brought him to our apartment, she brought him to parties. She was so proud and so in love with her children — I mean, my gosh. They were her pride and joy.” Not long before the tragedy, they made a special trip to Bamenga’s home to meet the new baby. “For me, it took — still has taken — some time to process,” Ferrara says. “Feelings of anger, feelings of sadness, obviously, and grief. I’m still kind of questioning: How did this happen? What could I have done? Did she ever give me any sort of sign? All I know is that Lisette is and was a great friend. She is a great person, a wonderful person who — something happened that night and she wasn’t there.”

Richard Harbus

Shoop, who has written about her own struggles with postpartum depression, agrees that it’s natural for people to look at a situation like Bamenga’s and find it impossible to believe. “But there’s no impossibility here,” she says. “And I don’t think there’s an impossibility for anyone. It’s just the forces that are outside: What direction are they pushing you? There’s only so much control that you have over that. We like to think that we have absolute control over that, and I don’t think that’s the case.” Spinelli says that this disconnection often comes up in cases involving postpartum psychosis. “How do you resolve that in your mind?” she says. “That a woman can be a loving mother, as Lisette certainly was, on every level, and someone who methodically went to the computer, looked up how to poison herself — people can’t put it together. So it’s a combination of that and people not understanding psychiatric illness.” She pauses, thinking. “But who can understand psychiatric illness on that level? Can you? Can I?”







Bamenga’s trial took place at the Bronx County Hall of Justice, a 10-story, contemporary edifice of glass and aluminum that rises like a shimmering cliff on E. 161st Street, just off the Grand Concourse. In the cramped storefronts that flank the courthouse and on the surrounding side streets, those who ply their trade in the borough’s notoriously congested courts advertise their services with dingy awnings blaring out messages of hope in capital letters: hurt at work? see an attorney right here right now; free consultation criminal cases; pay bail. The sidewalks teem with people who find themselves in unhappy contact with the wheels of justice. When Bamenga’s parents, Liliane and Maxence, started looking for legal representation right after Kenny and Violette were killed, they were still absorbing the enormity of the events that had transpired. According to Liliane Bamenga’s testimony, they did not even know what hospital their daughter was in until they found out from the news on TV. They initially retained a low-profile lawyer they found essentially at random, but before long, they switched Bamenga’s representation to Dowd, who was supported by his young Irish associate, Niall MacGiollabhuí.

“I can’t live knowing that I’ve been fooled this way. I am taking my children with me because they are the thing I have that is most dear.”

Dowd, 73 years old, has gray hair, watery blue eyes, and a slow, slightly lopsided gait. He wears hearing aids in both ears and occasionally digresses in his courtroom presentation, but he retains an old-school flair for the dramatic and remains a shrewd and skilled lawyer, with more than 30 years of often bruising trial experience and a particular expertise in dark domestic cases. Since 1979, the Queens native has built a reputation for his often successful representation of women who kill their abusive spouses, on the grounds that they were acting in self-defense. He has also over the years represented more than 150 people who were sexually abused as children by clergy, teachers and other authority figures. (Dowd was a central figure in a corruption scandal that embroiled the Queens Democratic Party in the 1980s; he cooperated with prosecutors by blowing the whistle on a system of bribes and kickbacks, but in 1991 his license to practice law was suspended for three years for ethical violations before being fully reinstated.) In 1994, Dowd took on the case of Caroline Beale, a British woman who gave birth in a New York hotel room, immediately suffocated her baby and later tried to board a plane at JFK with the dead newborn hidden under her coat. When the body was discovered as she went through security, she was arrested on charges of murder. Dowd argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and that in her native country, she would have been immediately remanded for psychiatric treatment. Spinelli also served as an expert witness in the case, drawing on her clinical experience from the United Kingdom, where she had served with Channi Kumar, a pioneering psychiatrist in the field of maternal mental health. The strategy was successful. Beale eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was permitted to return to the United Kingdom, where she was immediately taken to a psychiatric hospital. Since then, Dowd has handled more than two dozen such cases.

Michael Schwartz for Daily News

In the U.K. and more than 20 other countries, when a woman kills a child under the age of 1, there’s a presumption of mental illness rather than criminality. The postpartum psychosis defense, however, is still only intermittently successful in U.S. courts. “There’s some progress,” says Twomey, who has written a book, “Understanding Postpartum Psychosis: A Temporary Madness,” aimed at educating legal and health-care professionals, as well as the general public. “But not only is our criminal court really a state-by-state thing; then, you’ve got the ‘which court and which judge’ thing. And the ‘what kind of attorney can you afford’ thing. And ‘what kind of experts can you afford.’ Then you’ve got all the social prejudices that may come in.” Defense expert Spinelli has been working in the field of maternal mental health for more than 20 years. On the stand, she testified extensively about the science behind postpartum and perinatal mental illness, and explained the particular risk that rapidly shifting postpartum hormone levels pose to women with bipolar disorder. She cited a study showing that women with bipolar illness and a family history of postpartum psychosis have a 70% chance of developing postpartum psychosis themselves. There was a history of postpartum psychosis on both sides of Bamenga’s family in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Spinelli said. Her great-aunt ended up being institutionalized; her paternal grandmother underwent an exorcism by a Catholic priest after throwing her infant daughter to the floor. The birth of Lisette Bamenga’s father and her ability to mother him was subsequently considered a blessing, and he had the nickname Masala, which means rebirth.



Spinelli interviewed Bamenga three times before the trial, first meeting with her in late August 2012, just seven weeks after the killings. Her examination convinced her that Bamenga had been suffering from postpartum psychosis that rendered her incapable of understanding what she was doing. “In my opinion, I absolutely believe that Miss Bamenga did not have the ability to appreciate or know that what she was doing or that killing her children was wrong.” Bamenga had told Spinelli that “she became like a robot” the day of the killings. “She said this feeling” — the urge to die — “was too intense. I had no control.” The doctor also said, “Then she reported to me the thought came to her of her children growing up without her. And she said, ‘I don’t want them to hurt. I didn’t want them to look for me and think that I abandoned them. If I have to go, they have to come with me.’ ” During an extensive conversation at her Upper West Side home, Spinelli tells me that she doesn’t hold out much hope for wholesale reform of U.S. law; she sees it as part of her life’s work to educate members of the legal profession about the realities of peripartum mental illness. “My whole testimony is basically teaching,” Spinelli says. “Because my whole thought is to use the courtroom as a classroom. Teach the judge, teach the court what this is about.” But a courtroom, in the end, is not a classroom. And a murder trial is not just a teachable moment. It is an attempt to get to the truth of a brutal human event and determine the consequences for the person on trial. It is a complicated and messy story, the telling of which has the highest possible stakes. The story told at Lisette Bamenga’s trial was in some ways as confusing and hard to understand as the event that precipitated it.







Lisette Bamenga and Trevor Noel met in 2003, when she was 20 and he was 23, and they were both working at Macy’s in Herald Square. She was attending Drew University and living with her parents in the Bronx. He was a handsome, strapping man who attended Lehman College and lived in Mount Vernon, N.Y., with his family. They began a relationship that would persist through turmoil and tumult for nine years leading up to the night that ended everything. At the beginning, it was a relationship like any other between two people in their early 20s just starting to make their way in the world. They occasionally took trips outside the city. They sometimes discussed the future, even marriage, but not too seriously. They broke up and got back together countless times over the years. The way Noel saw it, according to his testimony, they were really an official couple only until 2006, when he found out about a relationship she had with another man, a discovery that upset him, even though he admitted in court he didn’t know the extent of their attachment.

“You are nasty and perverted and cocky, people want to have kids by you. They can have you. There is no return from this.”

After that, Noel says he and Bamenga weren’t really “together,” even though they had their first child in 2008 and she moved in with him at his grandmother’s place in November 2011. In March 2012 they moved together to the apartment on Noble Avenue, in the hope that they were finally going to make a go of it as a family unit. She paid the rent, and he paid the bills. “[The relationship] was up and down,” he said about those few months they lived together, when she was pregnant with Violette. “One day it would be good, the next day it wouldn’t.” “It was on and off,” Bamenga said. “It would be off most of the time because while we were on, I would discover that he was stepping out of the relationship.” Through all this time, each of them continued on their respective career paths. After changing her major from pre-med to psychology, Bamenga went into the field of education, like both of her parents, getting her masters from Mercy College and teaching for several years at a new charter school in Bushwick before she transferred to the bilingual program at PS 58. Noel sold real estate for a while, then spent four years doing airport security with the Transportation Security Administration before he entered the NYPD Police Academy in 2011. He graduated that year and began working in the 28th Precinct in Harlem. Throughout the nine years they were involved, Noel and Bamenga fought over his ongoing infidelities. On at least one occasion, she showed up at his apartment when another woman was there; he refused to let her in and there was a scuffle between them before she left the scene. Sometimes, they exchanged passwords to email and voicemail accounts as a sign of trust, but she also once changed his voicemail password so that she could listen to the messages without his knowledge. Relatively early on, before Kenny was born, Bamenga even threatened him. “If she would ever…find out that I had another child or catch me having sex with someone else, that she would kill me,” Noel testified. He went on, saying Bamenga was quick-tempered and volatile, that she sometimes hit him, that he was worried she might hurt him. Some of Noel’s girlfriends were in Europe, where he traveled often. In fact, he was there, with Fiona, when Kenny was born on March 18, 2008. He had told Bamenga that he didn’t believe the child was his, that the baby was the result of Bamenga’s relationship with another man, an allegation she denied. When a paternity test confirmed that Kenny was indeed his son, Noel embraced his role as a father. “I was there financially, emotionally, I was in his life,” Noel said. Via Facebook That didn’t mean that everything was smooth between him and Bamenga. Far from it. They argued about things large and small, from the way she did the housework, to Kenny’s name — Noel wanted his son called Trevor, after himself, and eventually Bamenga agreed to that, although she and most people who knew the boy continued to call him Kenny. In 2010, when she found out she was pregnant again, she had an abortion because their relationship was so unstable. That same year, he formally went to her parents to discuss the possibility of marriage, framing his proposal in a way that would fit their traditional customs, but nothing came of it. Despite the nearly constant conflict, Bamenga and Noel kept getting back together. She knew of at least three of the many women he slept with, yet she continued riding the rollercoaster of their lives together into an unknown future. Her longtime colleague Ferrara, who had often hung out with Noel and Bamenga as a couple socially, said she had no idea of how bad things were between them. “It was not something that she ever shared with me,” she says, adding that Noel was mostly quiet at such meetings. “I had known they were on- and off-again, but she never came up to me and said, ‘Trevor did this and this and this.’ I didn’t think twice about it. It was like, they’re back together, they’re not. It just is what it is.” In August 2011, Bamenga found herself pregnant again. This time, they decided to have the baby. They renewed their talk about getting married and, while the likelihood of that waxed and waned, it seemed more possible than ever after they moved into the Noble Avenue apartment and had Violette on March 17, 2012. Through all the ups and downs, Bamenga continued to present a professional demeanor at the schools where she worked, and to impress everyone who encountered her with her diligence and devotion to Kenny, and later, to Violette. From the outside, Bamenga looked like a woman who had it all together, who might finally tie the knot with the father of her children. Then came the Fourth of July, 2012.

Michael Schwartz for Daily News TRYING TIMES Bamenga has her cuffs removed by a courthouse guard (left); conferring with her lawyer, Michael Dowd.







The day had started normally, with Trevor getting ready for work, which he usually did around midday for a shift that lasted until 9 p.m. Bamenga went with Violette to her parents’ house and used their washing machine to launder his police uniform, then returned with the baby to the apartment, where Kenny had been napping. Noel left for work. Bamenga planned to take the kids back to her parents’ house for a barbecue that afternoon. But before doing so, she made a decision that would change everything. Using commercially available spyware she had purchased the previous December, she decided to look at Noel’s email by accessing a laptop he had recently started using and had not yet protected with a password. What she found there shocked her. From a series of exchanges between Noel and Fiona, the woman in Spain she had already identified as one of his girlfriends, Bamenga deduced that she had given birth to Noel’s son within the previous few months. Among the emails she read was one offering to send “baby boy” hand-me-downs of Kenny’s and others discussing his displeasure over the fact that Fiona had given the child her last name instead of his.

“I had a feeling that I never felt before, which was an urge to die. That’s the best way I can explain it.”

Bamenga immediately called Noel to confront him with her discovery. He didn’t deny the existence of another child, but he said he couldn’t talk about it right then. After hanging up, Bamenga called his grandmother and mother to tell them about the baby. She also called Fiona to confront her with the news. At trial, Bamenga downplayed her reaction, saying only, “I was disappointed. I felt betrayed.” But her texts to Noel, which the prosecution presented at the trial, reveal a more heated response. “You are nasty and perverted and cocky, yeah, yeah, yeah, people want to have kids by you. No wonder you’re talking all that shit,” she wrote. “Trust me they can have you. (sic) There is no return from this. I hope you catch a disease that makes your dick fall off.” Catching a communicable disease was one of the immediate worries that concerned Bamenga: If he had gotten Fiona pregnant, that means they had had unprotected sex; any infections he had received could have been passed on to her. If he gave her AIDS — a disease she knew well because one of her aunts had died from it — that could have been passed along to the baby. The rest of the day followed in a downward spiral. At some point after her discovery, Bamenga poured bleach on some of Noel’s clothes. Then she went to her parents’ house for the holiday barbecue as planned. But instead of enjoying the festivities, she handed them the baby and left Kenny to play in the yard, while she went upstairs to her brother’s room. She wanted to be alone. When the fireworks began, they frightened Violette, and Bamenga’s father told her she needed to comfort her baby. Together, they stayed upstairs until she left for home later that night. While parking the car in front of her building, she told Noel on the phone not to come home. Then, as she walked along the hallway to the apartment, he showed up. At the trial, the two of them gave differing accounts of the encounter that ensued. He said she hit him; she said she pushed him away as he followed her around “like a puppy,” though she eventually let him in despite her resolve not to. She put the children to bed, first Kenny and, then, Violette. Afterwards, she and Noel launched into a prolonged argument. It ended with him gathering up some of his belongings and leaving. She sat on the floor crying for a while, continuing to text with him, and then finally went to bed.







Bamenga awoke on the morning of July 5 to the sound of a voicemail alert on her phone. It was around 8 a.m. The message was from Norma Kirkland, the daycare provider where Kenny had been going since infancy and where Violette spent her time when Bamenga was at work. She had a friend visiting and she wanted Bamenga to bring her kids over so they could meet. Kirkland is a warm, grandmotherly woman who has an abiding affection for Bamenga and was deeply attached to both of her children. At the trial she testified that Bamenga was always loving and attentive to the kids, and that she habitually asked for every detail of Kenny’s and Violette’s care — what they ate, how many diapers they used, what kind of play Kenny engaged in. Kirkland said that Bamenga didn’t seem like herself when she showed up that morning, that the young mother was unkempt and distracted. Uncharacteristically, she had not yet fed the children. Kirkland got Kenny something to eat while Bamenga nursed the baby. Bamenga testified that she had already been texting with Noel when she arrived at Kirkland’s place, and that she continued to text with him while she fed Violette. After leaving her kids at Kirkland’s, Bamenga drove home. Once she was alone in the apartment, almost immediately she sat down with her computer and started researching ways to die.

“It was a calculated act where thought was involved every step of the way: how she was going to kill the children.”

This is the point at which Bamenga seems to break away from the person she has always been, when she slides into a kind of darkness. How one explains this shift depends, in large part, on how one views Lisette Bamenga and what she went on to do later that day. The defense argues she went into a psychotic state, while the prosecution contends she engaged in a calculated murder plot, determined to revenge herself on Noel, to cause him pain. Certain pieces of forensic evidence provide a scaffolding of undisputed reality, but they don’t, in and of themselves, prove either version of Bamenga’s state of mind. For instance, the search terms that Bamenga entered into her computer that day are not in dispute. Among them: cyanide ; quick suicide ; calling Spain ; electrocution ; submerging an electrical appliance ; slitting your wrists ; water and electricity ; instant death ; drowning. Before that, though, she called Hunter College, where she was taking classes, to discuss a grant she was supposed to receive for her studies. The prosecution cited this as an indication that she was perfectly aware of what she was doing. When she left her apartment to pick up the kids late that afternoon, she looked for a place to buy windshield-wiper fluid. The first store she went to was closed, so she drove to a nearby Pep Boys and bought it there; Bamenga shows up, on the store’s surveillance video.

Then she picked up the kids at Norma Kirkland’s. “Her hair was wild, she had on something that I wasn’t expecting (her) to be wearing,” Kirkland said. “I asked, ‘Why are you like that? What happened to you?’ But she just hugged me and left.” Next, Bamenga talked to her mother on the phone — she did not indicate she was in any kind of distress — and drove her kids back to the apartment. She typed letters to Noel and her parents, printed them out and placed them on the kitchen counter. “I can’t live knowing that I’ve been fooled this way,” she wrote to her parents in French. “I am taking my children with me because they are the thing I have that is most dear and I don’t want to leave them with this liar.” Scrawled in a nearly illegible hand over this in English are the words, “I’m sorry, I love you, will watch over you guys.” And at some point, Lisette Bamenga killed her children. The defense never disputed that the children died at Bamenga’s hand. What remained a mystery was her state of mind when the killings took place.







It was in the afternoon, alone in her apartment, when Bamenga says she first began hearing voices. In pretrial psychological evaluations, Bamenga said that these voices were laughing at her, calling her “foolish.” At one point, she claims to have seen a disembodied version of herself pointing at her and also saying “foolish.” These voices and visions only intensified her powerful desire to kill herself. “I had a feeling that I never felt before, which was an urge to die,” Bamenga testified. “That’s the best way I can explain it. It wasn’t just a thought. This was a — a need to die and a need to die today. I never experienced it before, so it’s hard to explain, but it was a strong pull.… I need to die, and I need to die now. How can I make that happen?” She spoke of hearing and seeing things through a fog, of feeling numb and robot-like, with no control of her actions. She said she remembers drinking several glasses of juice spiked with wiper fluid; she remembers that when she poured some of her own juice into a cup for Kenny he didn’t like the taste, that he left it on the table and ran off to play. She said she does not remember writing the notes to Noel and her parents. That she doesn’t remember giving the children the toxic mixture of wiper fluid and juice. Doesn’t remember drowning her children in the bathtub, this despite an autopsy report that concluded both Kenny and Violette died of drowning, and Kenny had marks on his body — a bruise that was perhaps shaped like a hand, a few scrapes — that suggest he may have put up a struggle. She does not remember taping up the windows and turning on the gas. At some point after the children were dead, she sent Noel a picture of the two of them lying next to each other. She sent a text as well: “I’m sorry. The kids are gone. I’m next.” Noel thought something was amiss. “I knew there may be an issue,” he testified. “They didn’t sleep like that together.” But he wasn’t sure what was going on, and he did not go to the apartment immediately after getting that message. He said he went to his aunt’s house after getting off work, and did not show up at the apartment until more than 50 minutes after the fire department arrived, at about 12:45 in the morning. When he did, he found the street filled with emergency vehicles. Det. Martin Pastor, who filled out the police report, said that Noel entered the building “with a worried look in his eyes.” Then, according to Pastor’s report, “I ask him if he knew ‘Kenny and Violet’ ”. Trevor stated ‘O my God -- she did it’. He then fell to the floor.” (sic) Pastor got down on the floor to console him. When they realized that Noel was a fellow officer, Pastor took Noel’s weapon from him. A little while later, Pastor wrote, “Trevor ask to make a phone call to his mother. I over heard Trevor saying ‘She did it. I should have came home earlier.’ ” (sic)







On the bench, Judge Marcus displays a calm, alert demeanor, frequently taking notes and asking questions. He paid close attention to the expert witnesses, asking many follow-up questions. His evaluation of their differing interpretations would be crucial to the resolution of the case. In the end, he had three choices before him when it came to the verdict. He could accept the defense’s contention that Bamenga was so mentally ill that she was incapable of telling right from wrong or appreciating the consequences of her actions — in legal terms, that she was “not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect.” This would result in her being sent to a psychiatric facility to be held indefinitely.

“Determining the appropriate sentence for you has been the most difficult decision I have had to make as a judge.”

He could accept the prosecution’s interpretation of events, which were summed up by Assistant District Attorney Nancy Borko this way: “Lisette Bamenga intended to kill her two children. She appreciated the nature and consequences of her actions and she knew that they were wrong. She did it clear-headed, not under the influence of extreme emotions under which she had no control. She wanted to kill her children and she did.” That would mean a conviction on the charge of murder in the first degree and a possible life sentence. Or he could find that she was acting under a condition of “extreme emotional disturbance.” That provision of the law would require him to find that “the defendant must have had an emotional disturbance so extreme as to result in and become manifest as a profound loss of self-control.” He alone would have to make this decision. On April 8, the day the verdict came down, the court officers stepped up security in the courtroom. Latex gloves on their hands, they stationed themselves along the aisles, in the doorways, and along the rail separating the audience from the the action, alert and ready for any potential outburst. The announcement, however, proved to be brief and without incident. Marcus didn’t take long to deliver the sentence. He said the defense had not proven that Bamenga was “not responsible,” but neither had the prosecution made the case for first-degree murder. Instead, he determined that Lisette Bamenga had killed her children under “extreme emotional disturbance.” This finding automatically reduced the charges from murder to first-degree manslaughter. He found her guilty on two counts, one for Kenny’s death, and one for Violette’s.

AP

Trevor Noel, who was not in court that day, later wrote to me in an email that he felt there had been a miscarriage of justice. “The verdict of first-degree manslaughter was anything but fair,” he wrote. “The postpartum defense was rejected yet the defendant received manslaughter because she was ‘emotional.’ (sic) I find it appalling that the defendant was convicted for anything less than what was proven in court due to the fact she is a woman. No man will ever get a lesser charge after intentionally murdering his own children because he is emotional.” Although Marcus hadn’t been convinced by the “not responsible” argument the defense had advanced, Dowd and MacGiollabhuí told Bamenga’s supporters and the reporters outside the courtroom that the verdict was a victory for their team. It would be crucial, they said, to send letters of support to Judge Marcus in order to make the case for a lenient sentence. The PS 58 parents stood in a tight circle, many with arms around each other, as they listened to the attorneys and took in the news, asking questions about what would come next. Many of them were wiping tears from their eyes. Prosecutor Borko, clutching a pile of papers in her arms as she walked away from the courtroom, stopped for a moment to answer reporters’ questions. “I think that Judge Marcus worked very hard to do what he thought was just,” she said. “I think it’s a very tragic situation. No one will walk out of here happy. Trevor Noel’s life will never be the same, the defendant’s life will never be the same, and you still lost two beautiful children.” The verdict was in. But for Lisette Bamenga, the suspense had not ended. Sentencing guidelines meant that Marcus had a tremendous amount of leeway in how much time she would serve. Each count of first-degree manslaughter carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years, and a maximum of 25. The sentences for the two crimes could be served consecutively or concurrently, as he saw fit. That meant that Bamenga, who had already been in jail for 3 years and nine months, could serve between 5 and 50 years in prison. She would not know how much time she would be serving for another five and a half weeks.







In the period between the verdict and sentencing, Marcus received dozens of letters urging him to be merciful — so many that the sentencing had to be postponed twice. They included eloquent pleas from Rikers staff and volunteers who had worked with Bamenga over the time she had been incarcerated. “Lisette has always been a leader,” wrote Suzy Petcheam, of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, who coached Lisette in theater performances through the school’s outreach program at Rikers. “There is a future for her. And I truly believe that, once released back in the community, she will make the right choices and will make a valuable contribution to society.”

“Lisette Bamenga was one of my favorite teachers at elementary school. She comforted us when we were sad, and had fun with us all the time.”

“She has become a trusted confidante, support, and source of guidance for many other incarcerated women seeking safety and respite,” wrote Kim Konopka, a counselor with a program called STEPS to End Family Violence. “She has already become a beacon of hope and security for many young women experiencing trauma and distress.” Letters arrived, too, from psychiatrists in the international community of postpartum mental health. And they came from her former students at PS 58. “Lisette Bamenga was one of my favorite teachers at elementary school,” one girl wrote. “Ms. Bamenga always made us laugh, comforted us when we were sad, and had fun with us all the time.” Marcus received letters from the family of Trevor Noel as well. “Their loss at your hand has been and always will be devastating,” Judge Marcus would say on May 17, addressing his remarks to Bamenga, when he finally handed down the sentence. “(Their) grief and anger is perfectly understandable…. I understand completely why is is so difficult for Trevor Noel’s family to accept that mental illness played a role in your conduct.” On May 17, the day of the sentencing, Bamenga entered the courtroom wearing a white pinstripe pantsuit that her family had provided, her hair neatly braided and twisted and up off her face. Her hands were cuffed behind her back when she came in; the restraints weren’t unlocked until she sat at the defense table. As always, she was flanked by armed guards. A couple of rows behind her sat her mother, Liliane, a small silver cross in her ceaselessly moving fingers. Borko, speaking crisply and decisively, rose to reiterate the people’s position that Bamenga was a heartless killer who had ruthlessly killed her kids in a bid for revenge. “What strikes me is how many times in that over 24-hour period, this educated woman, with a supportive family and a childcare network, could have done something to get these children out of harm’s way — the harm being brought about by her own anger at the baby’s father. But instead of making them safe, she took their lives.” She asked for two 20-year sentences, to be served consecutively, an outcome that would have Bamenga imprisoned until she was in her 60s.

Sarah Goodyear/Daily News

Dowd, in his final opportunity to speak on his client’s behalf, rose to give an impassioned speech about the distinction between illness and evil. “Do we really need psychiatrists — when we find someone has led this kind of spotless life and then does something that is so out of character in terms of their prior history — do we need a psychiatrist to know that something went wrong with their brain?” He asked that the court give Bamenga the minimum possible sentence of five years. Marcus then told Bamenga she could make a statement. She stood and spoke in a voice so quiet that the court reporter had to ask her to pause, then moved her transcription machine next to the defense table so that she could hear what Bamenga was saying. “I just want you to know that never in my right mind would I hurt anyone, especially my children, who meant the world to me,” said Bamenga, as those in the audience strained to hear her. “I think about them, Kenny and Violette, every single day. They will forever be a part of me. I also want to apologize to everyone who suffered through the loss because Violette and Kenny were not just my babies, they were loved by a lot of people.… After this tragedy, I want to make it a life mission of mine to bring awareness to postpartum depression and psychosis so that other families don’t suffer what my family is going through right now. That’s it. Thank you.” At last, the moment had come for the sentencing. The court officers planted their feet and scanned the courtroom, silently putting everyone on notice that they would tolerate no outbursts. The silence was complete. Before announcing the sentence, Judge Marcus gave some indication of just how much he had wrestled with the responsibility he held as the sole person in charge of resolving the case. “Determining the appropriate sentence for you has been the most difficult sentencing decision that I have had to make in the almost 26 years that I have served as judge,” he said. “This is a tremendously sad and tragic case. These were horrible, horrible crimes.”

POSTPARTUM PSYCHOSIS HELP If you or a loved one may be experiencing postpartum psychosis, you should treat it as any other medical emergency. Contact your physician, go to an emergency room or call 911. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a free and confidential service for anyone in emotional distress or suicidal crisis. Conselors are available around the clock. Call 800-273-TALK (8255). Other resources include: Postpartum Support International, 800-944-4773 The Action on Postpartum Psychosis Network Or visit the Postpartum Psychosis Alliance page on Facebook

Lisette Bamenga had killed her children intentionally, Judge Marcus said, and he had rejected the insanity defense because he determined that she knew what she was doing and she knew it was wrong. The finding of “extreme emotional disturbance” did not exonerate her, he explained, but only reduced the charges. However, he noted that both the defense and prosecution had found that she was suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness at the time of the crime. Addressing Bamenga, he continued, “It was clear from the testimony before me that even before July 2012, that you had suffered from mental issues which, like this final one, were undiagnosed and untreated and which culminated and aggravated the postpartum psychosis, and that your conduct was in the end, the product of a psychotic break triggered by the final revelation of the heartless and deceitful behavior of your children’s father.” The horrifying and inexplicable nature of the crime in itself argued for the extremity of her mental state, he concluded. “Your bizarre planning and persistence in taking their lives and attempting to take your own, including researching online various methods of killing your children…demonstrated to me your clear intention to take their lives as well as your own, but it also demonstrated to me the extremity of the emotional disturbance that led you to kill them, a disturbance so extreme that…it resulted in and became manifest as a profound loss of self-control.” When considering a sentence, he continued, judges are required to look at several factors, including deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution. He believed that now that her mental condition was recognized and being treated, a long sentence was not necessary to deter her from future crimes or to rehabilitate her. The condition of retribution, however, had to be fulfilled. “In sentencing you, I cannot ignore the shocking gravity of your crimes, for which having been a model mother, a model teacher and a model prisoner cannot compensate.” The psychosis, however, “mitigates substantially the blameworthiness of your conduct and makes retribution less of a factor in your sentence.” Finally, with many members of the audience literally sitting on the edge of their seats, he announced the sentence: eight years on each count, to be served concurrently, and five years’ supervision after her release. It was over. With time served and time off for good behavior, the sentence meant that Bamenga could walk free in just about three years.

“The sentence was a travesty. There is more sympathy for the perpetrator than the victims.”

In the hallway outside the courtroom, Bamenga’s supporters clustered around Dowd and MacGiollabhuí, hanging on their every word. Liliane Bamenga collapsed against a wall, her sobs ringing out against the cold marble. Later, outside the courthouse, she said they were tears of joy. Spinelli beamed with joy. “It was really fair,” she told me. “[Judge Marcus] really got it.” For Noel’s family, the outcome was bitter. “I feel like there’s no justice in this sentence,” Susan Boose, Trevor Noel’s aunt, told me moments after she walked out of the courtroom. “(Bamenga) played judge and jury in the life of her children and sentenced us to a life of misery and pain.” She found the short duration of the sentence to be especially infuriating. “She could also have other children and put them in danger,” she said, shaking her head before she turned and walked away. Later, over email, Noel gave me his own reaction. “The sentence was a travesty. Eight years for two premeditated murders. There is more sympathy for the perpetrator than the victims. The judge took all these support letters into account without requesting to hear from the father, who was directly affected.” He added, “I took the stand and was given no opportunity to explain the pigeonhole yes or no questions the defense was asking me. (sic) It would not have mattered anyway, the decision was made prior to the case. The judge, prosecutor and defense attorney showed bad taste laughing and joking during the trial in front of the bench. This trial was a joke.”

Courtesy Susan Moran







The day after the sentencing, I visit Bamenga at the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s holding facility at Rikers, accompanied by her brother Rudy. The visiting room’s drab gray and white walls and scuffed linoleum floor are illuminated by harsh fluorescent light. Windows, secured by horizontal bars, look out onto more walls topped with barbed wire. Despite these grim conditions and her baggy, prison-issue gray jumpsuit, Bamenga appears more alive than the last time I saw her, standing in the courtroom in her spotless white suit. Then, I could barely hear her voice when she made her brief statement. Now, as she gradually becomes more comfortable over the course of our conversation, I see flashes of the person everyone has described to me, the one who laughs and jokes and displays that high-wattage smile. We sit in plastic chairs facing each other across a low table with a large number 21 drawn on its scratched, fake-wood Formica. Rudy, a soft-spoken and thoughtful young man, sits beside me. It’s twilight on an overcast May evening, and as the three of us talk the world outside slowly fades to black. We sit like this for almost an hour. “It’s been hard, being in limbo,” she says, adding that she is ready to move on to the next chapter of her life. Next week or the week after, she expects to be sent upstate to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She’s looking forward to the change because she knows there are more educational and rehabilitative programs for prisoners up there. She is happy, of course, that Judge Marcus gave her a relatively lenient term, one that will allow her to try to “put together the pieces” of her life. She seems genuinely moved by the way he handled the case. “I felt understood,” she says. “When he was talking to me, I really felt like he was talking to me. I felt like he got me.”

“We were as much a part of those children’s lives as anyone. How can our mourning be disregarded just because we did not shun Lisette when she needed us the most?”

Still, she says, the prison term imposed by the judge is not the real punishment. That comes from within. “I am serving a life sentence,” she says. And while she looks forward to going home, to figuring out how she will move forward once she is released, the thought of being on the outside is daunting. Sometimes, she says, she finds herself imagining that Kenny and Violette are still out there in the world, that Kenny might call her on the phone. She is apprehensive about the moment when she will walk into her parents’ house, where she lived with Kenny for much of his life. “When I used to walk in that house, there would be people running to me,” she says. She means Kenny. She knows that he won’t be running to greet her anymore, but she can’t quite imagine yet what that will be like. I ask her if she might ever have kids again. Yes, she says, she might, if she found the right person. She is happy that she will be getting out of prison in time for that to be a possibility. But there would be no replacing Kenny and Violette. She wants that to be clear.







When I talk to the people who have supported Bamenga for all these years, none of them are able to comprehend what she did. None of them can say that they truly understand. But many of them talk about their belief in the possibility of finding meaning in something so senseless. “I believe this story is bigger than all of us,” Susan Moran says. “It’s needed for parenting skills, it’s needed for postpartum psychosis. It’s needed for education. There’s so many levels on which this story needs to be told.” Margarita Sánchez, whose daughter was in Bamenga’s class, says, “This is the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. Many of us are going to go on and support Dr. Spinelli in her work.” Spinelli, for her part, says she was so impressed by Judge Marcus’ grasp of the issues that she is going to write him a letter asking him if he would be willing to speak with other legal professionals about the matter. For Rudy Bamenga and other members of Kenny and Violette’s immediate family, the search for meaning is, of course, far more painful and fraught. But when we rode the bus to Rikers together, Rudy, an aspiring filmmaker, told me that he is thinking about making a documentary that will deal with the journey he and his family have been on. Something that could reach the people who need the help he says his sister never got. He says he wants to send me an email articulating the thoughts he wasn’t able to put into words when reporters asked him for comment after the sentence was announced. The next day, it shows up in my inbox, along with a heartbreaking picture of him holding baby Kenny. This is some of what it said: “As much as I stand behind and support Lisette, I am still part of that family that is suffering from the loss, as are my parents. I looked after Kenny the first summer of his life while my parents and sister worked.… “We were as much a part of those children’s lives as anyone else, so how can our mourning be disregarded just because we did not choose to shun Lisette from our family when she needed us the most? Unfortunately, there is nothing that my sister, nor I, nor my family, can do to take away the Noel family’s pain, but we hope that our story, our journey and our experiences can help prevent future tragedies of this nature.” Lisette Bamenga herself will always live within that tragedy in a way no one else will ever be able to understand. For her, the path forward is, at least for now, contained by the grim and unforgiving walls of the correctional system. When I sat with her there, in that stark setting, I couldn’t stop thinking about one simple question, the one I have wanted to ask her ever since I first heard about what she did: How does she go on? She answers that she isn’t really sure. That, at first, she felt nothing and barely knew what was going on around her. That she has, over the slowly passing years, found comfort in prayer, and in the support of her family and friends. That some days are worse than others. At Halloween, for instance, she is reminded of how she and Kenny used to dress up together. “Violette never got a Halloween,” she says. She says she also is motivated to keep going by the idea that her story might help other women with perinatal mental illness. That she could, by educating others about what happened to her, prevent it from happening to someone else. Time is up. She embraces Rudy, embraces me, and walks toward the guards who will take her away. The last glimpse I get of her, she is waving at her brother. Smiling.

CORRECTIONS: Postpartum depression affects one in every seven women who give birth, not seven in every 1,000 women, as we originally reported.

Perinatal mental health issues occur during pregnancy or after childbirth, not in the weeks or months before pregnancy, as we originally reported. We regret the errors.



CREDITS: Digital Longform Editor, Joe Angio; Deputy Digital Longform Editor, Bruce Diamond; Interactive Developer, Evie Liu. Banner photos: via Facebook