CNN: Dead children lay side by side

DE QUEEN, Arkansas (AP) -- A mother accused of smothering her three young children left notes that officials say could help determine what led to the killings, and her priest said Sunday that she had expressed "tremendous remorse."

Paula Eleazar Mendez, 43, was in a county jail Sunday after being treated at a hospital for swallowing a toxic substance.

She had collapsed as officers arrived at her home Saturday morning in response to a telephone call from the children's father in New York. Inside the home, the officers found the bodies of the children, ages 6 to 8, lying side by side on a bed, said Chris Brackett, an investigator with the Sevier County Sheriff's Office.

"I do not believe there is any dispute as to who killed these three children, and therefore who will be charged," prosecutor Tom Cooper said. "However, we have not determined at this time the particular homicide charge or punishment we will be seeking."

The notes found in the house may help officials better understand what led to the killings, De Queen Police Chief Richard McKinley said, though he declined to disclose their contents.

A family priest who visited Mendez in a hospital Saturday night described a woman experiencing profound sorrow.

"She has tremendous remorse. She is deeply sorry," the Rev. Salvador Marquez-Munoz said Sunday before entering St. Barbara Catholic Church for Mass. "She asked for our prayers and forgiveness because she is realizing how much she has hurt the community, as well."

He identified the children as 8-year-old Elvis and 6-year-old twins, Samanta and her brother Samuel.

Autopsies were planned to determine whether the children had been poisoned or smothered, as their mother told police, Cooper said. The children's faces were not covered when police found them.

Cooper said an emergency room doctor told him Mendez had not ingested enough of the toxic substance to kill herself. Her arraignment is expected Monday, McKinley said.

In the house's yard Sunday was a seven-foot pile of burned papers. A page in a religion book bore the words "vamos a celebrar" -- Spanish for "let's celebrate." A child's handwriting was scrawled in blue ink across some papers, and there were charred letters from a labor union in New York City.

The priest said Mendez, who moved to the United States from Mexico 10 years ago, had lived in New York until last summer, when she moved with her children to De Queen because wanted them to live in a safer environment.

He described her as a quiet, devout woman concerned about her children's welfare. She was not working, and her husband was supporting the family with a job in New York, he said. She and the children never missed Sunday services and attended religious education classes.

Mendez seemed "very loving," said M. Rocio Maya, 29, who attended the Mass and said that she had known Mendez for a few months. Maya said that she never saw Mendez strike her children and that she drove them to school, rather than allow them to ride a bus.

The children's father, Arturo Morales, 37, had planned to buy a house in De Queen with Mendez and move there for good, said Maya's husband, Juan Mosqueda.

Morales was to arrive in De Queen before a funeral was to be set.

ABCnews: Mother and daughter killed in bed

"Jan. 25, 2006 — Police have made contact with the man whose wife and daughter were found dead in the master bedroom of their Hopkinton, Mass., home on Sunday.

When the bodies of Rachel Entwistle, 27, and her 9-month-old baby, Lillian, were found nestled in Rachel's bed, police originally thought they might be victims of carbon monoxide poisoning. It was not until medical examiners discovered bullet wounds in the mother and daughter that police suspected foul play.

The deaths have been ruled homicides.

Authorities have made contact with Neil Entwistle, Rachel's husband and Lillian's father, according to Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley. Coakley said Entwistle was out of the country, but would not say whether he was in England, where he lived previously. His BMW was found in the United States. He remains a person of interest but has not been arrested.

Rachel Entwistle was last heard from on Thursday, when she spoke with a relative. The Entwistles had scheduled a dinner party on Saturday, but after no one answered the door for the party, relatives called police on Sunday.

The deaths have rocked the small Massachusetts town, where the last murder took place in 1995.

"There is no reason to believe the residents of the neighborhood or community should be in fear of a repetition of this," Hopkinton police Chief Thomas Irvin said. "There was no forced entry."

The Entwistles had moved into the neighborhood 11 days ago from southeastern Massachusetts, where they'd lived with relatives.

Rachel Entwistle had a background in teaching; Neil had worked in information technology. Neither one was employed as of last week.

Neil Entwistle is from England, according to the family's Web site. Photos on the site depict a happy family — Rachel and Neil on a Christmas cruise through the Mediterranean in 2004, the couple's invitation to their 2003 wedding, and photos of baby Lillian from baptism to her first Christmas.

A message on the home page is signed, "love, the happy family."

Since Sunday, the couple's online guest book has filled with messages of sympathy, anger and accusations from friends, Rachel's former students in England, and strangers.

One anonymous poster simply wrote: "WHY?" "

CNN: Crash kills 7 children in Florida

"CNN) -- Seven members of a family died Wednesday when a tractor-trailer rear-ended their car in northeast Florida, slamming it into a school bus that had stopped to let off children, an official said.

All the occupants of the Pontiac car were children ages 21 months to 15 years, said Lt. Mike Burroughs of the Florida Highway Patrol. It burst into flames upon impact, killing all its occupants, he said.

The seven children were related, he said, adding that it was not clear which of them was at the wheel at the time of the wreck. In Florida, it is illegal for a 15-year-old to drive without a licensed adult in the car.

Three of nine children on the school bus were seriously injured and were taken by helicopter to hospitals. None of the students' injuries was life-threatening,
said Lt. Bill Leeper of the Florida Highway Patrol.

A spokeswoman for Shands hospital in Gainesville said eight patients were transported. Two were in critical condition; three in serious condition, said Betsy Miller. The youths ranged in age from 5 to 16, she said.

The incident happened four miles south of Lake Butler in Union County, some 20 miles north of Gainesville, shortly after 3 p.m.

All the vehicles were headed north at the time of the wrecks, Leeper said, adding, "For some reason, the driver failed to stop."

The driver of the semi was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening, Leeper said.

The accident happened in good weather along a straight stretch of road that has a posted speed limit of 60 mph.

"There doesn't seem to be any reason why the semi could not observe the two vehicles stopped," Leeper said. "For some reason -- we're still trying to determine why -- he did not stop."

"It's a very chaotic scene," Burroughs said. "We're having trouble removing the family members from the car because of the way the car is lodged in and tied in with the metal pieces of the tractor-trailer."

"It is a mangled, fiery crash," he said, adding that "it was a very sad moment" when victims' family members visited the scene.

The bus was carrying students home from Lake Butler Elementary School and Lake Butler Middle School.

The National Transportation Safety Board said a team of investigators was to arrive Wednesday night at the crash site.

A nearby resident complained about the truck traffic on the two-lane road.

"The semis drive way too fast," said Effie White."

CNN: Mom realizes she helped her child's killer go free

"SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (CNN) -- -- Jennifer Watts is reliving a parent's worst nightmare - the death of her child. But in her quiet, emotional, yet articulate way, she is revealing the true, lingering horror of her story - how she may have helped her son's killer elude justice forever.

"It's all real, everything that I imagined is true, and everything that I've lived with all these years is true," she said in her home last week.

"It's hard to look back on everything and realize that I defended the man that killed my son." (Watch what she knew and when -- 7:16)

For even though the murderer walked into a police station and confessed to police officers, the justice system cannot touch him. The taped confession of what happened nearly 15 years ago is chilling. When Jennifer Watts came home from church to a quiet house, she simply assumed that her young son Paul was asleep.

He had been fine that Sunday morning in February 1991, and Jennifer's live-in boyfriend Michael Lane had stayed home to watch the 20-month-old.

But within hours the nightmare began for Watts, then a single mom of 20, the nightmare that has been made worse again and again over the last 15 years.

For Paul, who was known as P.J., was not dreaming in his crib, but lying there dead - murdered, with multiple head injuries.

Watts and her boyfriend, Lane, had lived together for 2-months. He was charged with murder and tried. But at that time neither Watts nor the jury - perhaps swayed by Watts - believed Lane guilty and he was acquitted.

Watts stayed with Lane for four more years until one day when she saw his extremely violent side and suddenly realized he had beaten her son to death.

"He kicked the dog, and the dog's leg was broken, I mean bad broken, and at that moment, when I saw that, that I looked at him and I said 'That's what happened, wasn't it, that day -- you lost your temper, P.J. was crying and you lost your temper right?' "

Lane insisted he was innocent for another decade and when he finally confessed to Salt Lake City police a few months ago, there was nothing the justice system could do. He had been tried and acquitted and under the "double jeopardy" provision of the U.S. Constitution could not be tried again.

So, not only did Watts find her baby murdered, not only did she stand by the man she later found out killed him, but now she also has to live knowing that he will never pay for his crime.

"He stole a part of me I'll never get back. I'm a different person now ... angry ... it's not fair," she told me through tears at an interview.

She says she is upset and embarrassed that she could not see what others thought so obvious -- that Michael Lane, at home alone with the little blond boy who had just been learning to walk and talk, was the man who had to have killed her son.

There is also the gut-wrenching guilt that her loyalty, her belief that someone else or maybe even an accident was to blame for P.J.'s death, helped to persuade the jury that any doubts about Lane's guilt were reasonable. Prosecutor James Cope said he thought that some of the jurors might have said that if the boy's mother was not convinced, how could they be?

Watts has moved from Utah now, but says she finds it difficult to move on with her life, thinking every day of P.J. and how he would be 17 now. And she thinks of how Michael Lane can admit -- in graphic detail -- how he killed the child by repeatedly hurling the child onto the floor in an attempt to stop him from crying, and yet not be punished.

"There was a little life there and it needs to mean something, and it needs to mean something to everybody," Watts said.

"Nobody's been held accountable for it and that's not right."

Michael Lane refused CNN's request for an interview."

This is just awful.