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'I blessed them and then I suffocated them'Police: Mom may have fed 3 kids poisoned hot chocolate
 Eleazar Paula Mendez pleaded not guilty Monday to charges she murdered her three children. 
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSDE QUEEN, Arkansas (AP) -- A woman accused of smothering her three children was distraught over the breakup of her marriage and told police that she blessed the children before suffocating them, a prosecutor said Monday. In addition, police said, she may have fed the children hot chocolate laced with poison before she smothered them. Eleazar Paula Mendez pleaded innocent to three counts of capital murder and was ordered held without bail Monday. The judge also ordered a mental evaluation. Mendez, 43, told investigators she tried to kill herself on Friday by ingesting ant poison, Prosecutor Tom Cooper said. She said the children saw her take the pesticide and asked her to kill them, too, he said. "'I blessed them and then I suffocated them,"' Mendez told investigators, according to Cooper. Cooper said he believes Mendez poisoned the children before suffocating them, but he questions other parts of her account. The children's bodies were sent to the state Crime Laboratory for autopsies. Police found the bodies of 7-year-old Elvis and 5-year-old twins Samantha and Samuel on a bed in their home Saturday after a call from the children's worried father, Arturo Morales, 37, who lives in New York. Mendez left a note in Spanish saying she could not go on without her husband, the prosecutor said. Elsewhere in the house, authorities discovered four cups on a table near a container of ant poison. "It looked like they had been drinking some hot chocolate," Police Chief Richard McKinley said. "We also found nearby some poisoning. The poisoning was called Tempo. It was an insecticide poisoning. We also found, right by that, a mixing glass." He said the mixing glass and the cups were also sent to a lab for tests. Mendez moved to the small Arkansas town about a year ago to give the children a safer environment, and friends said Morales had been planning to join her. He was to have visited the family in Arkansas during the Christmas holiday, but he didn't show up, so Mendez took the children to New York, Police Chief Richard McKinley said. During the visit, Morales asked for a divorce, he said. Cooper said Mendez had left a note in Spanish saying she couldn't go on without Morales. "She wanted to stay together. She hoped that he was happy in his new endeavor and didn't want to live without him," Cooper said. Morales had arrived in De Queen but hadn't spoken at length with prosecutors. "He's having a hard time making sense of everything," McKinley said. Mendez, who speaks limited English, listened to an interpreter through headphones during Monday's hearing. She replied "Si" when asked if she understood the court's procedures. Defense attorney Norman Cox said the mental evaluation ordered by the judge would likely delay the case for six to nine months Friends described Mendez as a caring mother. "Many times she showed me photos of her children," said M. Rocio Maya, who attended St. Barbara Catholic Church with the family. "She showed me when she was pregnant with each one of them, photos of her husband, of the happy life that they had always lived." The Rev. Salvador Marquez-Munoz said Mendez had lived in the United States for 10 years since moving from Mexico, and left New York for Arkansas so her children could grow up in a safer environment. The family never missed Sunday Mass and attended religious education classes, he said. The priest said he spoke with her at the hospital Saturday night. "She has tremendous remorse. She is deeply sorry," he said Sunday. "She asked for our prayers and forgiveness because she is realizing how much she has hurt the community, as well." Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. 
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