Police responded to a 911 call from a truck driver who said he saw a car sitting in a ditch in Hillsborough, New Jersey, at around 7:40 a.m., according to a statement from the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office.
According to the truck driver’s father, the man found the mother, Yuhwei Chou, 36, and her children in the car and called police immediately.
“He was shook up,” the caller’s father, Robert Long, told CBS New York. “He said he found a lady in the ditch and said he asked her if she was all right and she said no, I think. And then he seen the babies and then he called the cops right away.”
When police arrived, they found Chou in her car along with her two children, 7-year-old Samantha Ross and 10-month-old Paul Ross.
According to police, both children were restrained and bound in their car seats and were unresponsive. They were pronounced dead at the scene.
Neighbors told CBS New York that Chou and her family kept to themselves but that they’d seen officers at the home before.
A neighbor, Austen Wang-Bailey, said that if they thought there was any chance of the children being hurt, they would have stepped in.
“What could I have done? What could I have said?” Wang-Bailey asked.
The motive is still under investigation. Chou is being charged with two counts of first-degree murder and will be booked at the local jail after a medical evaluation, according to police. An autopsy to determine the official cause of death is still underway.
In May, a mother in Arizona was charged with killing her two children with a meat cleaver. Newsweek reported that the murder occurred after the woman got into a fight with her husband about moving to Japan.
Yui Inoue, 40, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
Police stated that Inoue drove to a nearby police station and told one of the officers that she was, “hearing voices, telling her to kill her kids.”
When police arrived at the scene, they found the unresponsive bodies of her 7-year-old and 9-year-old children. Earlier in the day, police said they responded to a report of domestic violence and separated Inoue and her husband.
According to authorities, Inoue allegedly attempted to stab her husband before attacking her children with a meat cleaver.
“There were significant injuries to their bodies,” police said. “Including numerous lacerations, incised wounds and some amputations, consistent with a violent attack and defensive wounds.”
Inoue claimed she did not remember killing her kids until after she took a bath. Police told reporters that the officers were struggling with what they saw on the scene because the victims were so young.
