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Distraught mom kills 2 daughters and self after son’s suicide

A mother despondent over her son’s suicide killed her two young daughters and herself early Tuesday using nitrogen gas at their home, about a week after a stay in a mental institution, authorities said.

East Greenbush Police Chief Christopher Lavin said a 911 call at about 1:45 a.m. sent police to the town house in the Albany suburb of East Greenbush, where they found the mom and girls, ages 6 and 9, unconscious from exposure to the odorless gas in a first-floor bedroom.

Rescuers had to break down the door to the locked room and tried CPR for a half-hour before the three were taken to Albany Medical Center, where they died.

The mother, 47-year-old Angela Mtambu, was recently released from a Pennsylvania mental institution after being overcome with grief when her 23-year-old son asphyxiated himself in the same home in April, authorities said.

Bernard Pamberi holds back tears as he speaks of his dead sister and two nieces.AP

“I just think she couldn’t take it,” the woman’s brother, Bernard Pamberi, told reporters outside the home as he fought back tears.

Police said the father of the girls, Callidora and Eudora Thurston, has been notified.

Angela Mtambu was a traveling nurse who was working in Houston this spring when she decided to return to the home she has owned for 12 years. A Texas relative who was concerned that the distraught Mtambu might be planning to kill herself and her daughters notified authorities in East Greenbush, and an Amber Alert was issued June 1.

Mtambu was taken into protective custody in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and local social services took custody of the two girls, Lavin said.

Mtambu was kept nearly three weeks for psychiatric observation before being allowed to reunite with her daughters and no order of protection was issued. Lavin said she rejoined her family last week, social services followed up with visits to check on the children’s welfare, and on Sunday night she was again allowed to sleep in the same room with her daughters.

Pamberi and another brother who were staying in the home to help out said they awakened to the sound of hissing gas Tuesday morning but couldn’t get out of their room because they had been locked in. Pamberi said he then made the emergency call.

Lavin said three police officers were the first to arrive at the scene and were affected by the high level of nitrogen gas. They weren’t injured. He said more than one 30-pound tank of the gas was found in the room.

Lavin suggested Mtambu was intent on mimicking the death of her son.

Autopsies were expected to be performed on Wednesday, Lavin said.