A Wisconsin mom has been charged with first degree homicide and attempted homicide after confessing to strangling her eight-year-old son to death and holding her 11-year-old son underwater in a bathtub.
A criminal complaint filed Tuesday revealed that the suspect, Natalia Aleksandrovna Hitchcock, had become increasingly paranoid and began acting out of character after the war in Ukraine began. The Sheboygan Falls resident has Russian roots and her parents still live in Russia.
Oliver Hitchcock, the eight-year-old boy, died in hospital Friday due to injuries he sustained on Wednesday when his mother allegedly choked him unconscious.
Oliver’s older brother was also attacked the weekend prior. Natalia said she held him underwater in the family’s bathtub, but only to scare him. According to the complaint, she said it would have been difficult for her to kill the older boy because of his size.
During the incident on Wednesday, Natalia also stabbed herself in the chest. She told police that she tried to “cut her heart,” according to WTMJ Milwaukee.
After Oliver lost consciousness from being strangled, the older sibling woke up his father, who was also in the apartment during the attack, saying that his brother was dead. According to the court filings, the father performed CPR on Oliver before first responders arrived and rushed him to hospital.
The names of Oliver’s father and elder brother have not been released, but the complaint stated that Natalia and the children’s father have been married for 15 years.
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Natalia’s husband told investigators that the war in Ukraine had been taking a toll on his wife’s mental health, but stated that she did not have any previously diagnosed mental illnesses. He specifically cited that he became worried about his wife’s state of mind as she watched TV reports on the war.
The complaint says that the father “added that within the last prior few days (Natalia) Hitchcock also wanted to buy survival gear such as a camping stove and fuel and also wanted to buy knives and guns.”
The complaint revealed that her husband “felt the war between Russia and Ukraine amped up (Natalia) Hitchcock more than ever and that she started to drink alcohol.”
Allegedly, Natalia was angry that she couldn’t book a flight to Russia to see her parents.
“She also said that people had been looking at her strange and felt that people looked at her as a Russian spy,” the complaint reads.
When officers spoke to Natalia about the attack she told them that “someone was controlling her mind and she had been poisoned.”
According to the complaint, Natalia was gripped by delusions that day and was hallucinating voices, “she began to have thoughts that the Russian government was going to take her children and abuse them.”
“She believed it best to take Victim 1’s (Oliver’s) life because he was the youngest and most vulnerable. She said that she believed Victim 1 (Oliver) would not have been able to defend himself if he had gotten abused and she thought it better to kill him rather than watch him be abused.”
Natalia is being held in county jail on a $1-million bond. When law enforcement notified her in jail that her son had died from his injuries, the complaint said she replied, “‘Well, I guess I accomplished what I set out to do then.’ Shortly thereafter she began to cry softly and said she did it because she was concerned that her son was going to be sexually assaulted and she felt he would be better off dead.”
Eric Hitchcock, brother of Natalia’s husband and uncle to Oliver, started a GoFundMe page to support his brother and nephew. In the post, he explains that the donations from the fundraiser with help the family “begin to cope with a life that has been turned upside-down by a senseless act of violence.”
Eric also noted on the page that Natalia had never been aggressive or abusive in the past. “We are left with nothing but questions as to why and how this could happen.”
WTMJ reports that as Natalia walked out of court on Tuesday, she apologized to her husband. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
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