STATEN ISLAND — Police said a father, convinced he was the victim of a voodoo curse, apparently drowned his two young children in a bathtub and then killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train.
Thirty-nine-year-old Franz Bordes, 39, a Haitian immigrant, died at 8 p.m. Wednesday at a Brooklyn subway station.
Investigators found several suicide notes indicating Bordes did not get along with relatives of the children’s mother, also a Haitian immigrant.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly called one of the notes “rambling”and said “it makes reference to voodoo being used against him.”
Bordes, who was unemployed, lived with 42-year-old Francoise Mercier, and their two young children, a two-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, in an apartment on Staten Island. Family members told police that the father usually looked after the children while the mother went to work as a nurse’s aide.
There was no water in the tub at the time the bodies were discovered, but a disposable diaper worn by the 2 year old was soaked with water, leading police to believe the children had been drowned.
The cause of their death will be determined by the medical examiner.
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