MIAMI – New surveillance video shows a troubled mother pacing in front of her apartment in what appears to be a bath towel.
Sometime during the day, neighbor Edith Doleo had a chance encounter with that mother, 41-year-old Odette Jossaint, and said she was clutching items that belonged to each of her children.
“She went ahead and showed the bear and said Jeffrey, Jeffrey, and basically she was saying I killed first Laura,” said Doleo. “She was trying to tell me something.”
Hours later, Joassaint would be arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of her three-year-old son Jeffrey and her five-year-old daughter Laura.
It was Tuesday evening when police said Jossaint called 911 herself, multiple times, but hung up.
Officers said they arrived to the home on Northeast 75th Street and 1st Court to check on things and encountered Joassaint in emotional distress, possibly hallucinating and uttering the words, “Come get them, I don’t want them anymore.”
Police found the children dead inside of the home, face down on a bed and tied up.
A neighbor’s camera shows the medical examiner’s office carrying away the children’s remains.
Local 10 News has learned the children’s father, Frantz Belval, and Joassaint had a rocky relationship.
Court records show that Belval was arrested in 2019 for aggravated battery against a pregnant woman and was issued a stay away order for Joassaint, who was carrying the three-year-old boy at the time.
But just a year prior, Joissant herself was charged for battery and she too was issued a stay away order from Belval.
No one though, according to loved ones, could predict the double horror that unfolded in the Miami apartment earlier this week.
Now the doorstep where Joissant lived with her two children has been lined with toys, stuffed animals and other items. There is even a handwritten note about the unimaginable loss that no one saw coming.