How many white women would marry this 'nubian prince'?
Dad kills kids, himself
'Why mine?' cries ma after voodoo-crazed beau
with 2 other clans drowns her boy & girl
BY VERONIKA BELENKAYA, TAMER EL-GHOBASHY and ALISON GENDAR
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Click: Timeline to tragedy
She walked into her Staten Island home, saw her lover's wedding ring tossed onto a bookcase and knew something was horribly wrong.
"I went to the living room and I don't see my kids inside. And I walked to the bedroom and I don't see them," Staten Island mother Francoise Mercier wept yesterday.
"Something in my head told me go to the bathroom, and I saw them in the tub."
Mercier's lover - convinced he was the victim of a voodoo curse - had drowned their two helpless children while she was at work and then committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a Brooklyn subway.
In seven rambling suicide letters, Frantz Bordes, 39, raged against Mercier's relatives and accused them of casting evil spells over him, police said.
"They use everything against me," the unemployed Haitian immigrant wrote, according to police. "Most of all they use voodoo."
Six of the twisted letters were scattered throughout the St. George apartment where he drowned his kids - Sweitzer, 4, and Stephanie, 2-1/2 - in a bathtub Wednesday afternoon, police said.
The seventh suicide note was found tucked inside Bordes' jacket after cops pulled his decapitated body out from under a Q train at the Church Ave. station in Ditmas Park.
"My love for my children is a weapon to destroy me," he wrote.
Only hours after finding her murdered children, Mercier told the Daily News that she had recently discovered that Bordes - who has a wife and two children in Haiti - also had been hiding a third family in Queens, with two more kids.
"Why did he kill mine? He has two others here and two in Haiti. Why did he kill mine?" the 43-year-old mom wailed.
Her relatives said Bordes had threatened to murder the children at least once before. But Mercier insisted that while he was "a big fat liar" for hiding his Queens kids, she never dreamed he would harm their children.
"This is what is killing me: Why didn't I have a warning?" she asked. "I didn't see any signs. If only I saw any signs."
"If I was home, he would not be able to kill them," she cried. "He would have killed me, too - but that would have been good."
By the time she found her lifeless children late Wednesday, the bathtub had drained. Her son was naked. Her daughter was wearing only a disposable diaper, soaked with water, police said.
Mercier said she worked as a nurse's aide while Bordes cared for their kids and took finance classes at a city college.
Nothing seemed amiss at 2:20 p.m. Wednesday when she headed off to work at St. Elizabeth Ann's nursing home on Staten Island.
Mercier said she called home at 8:20 p.m. to check on her son and daughter. But no one answered the phone. She had no way to know that Bordes and their kids were already dead.
Cops notified Bordes' next of kin after finding him on the subway tracks, and his relatives then told police they were worried that his children had been left home alone. Police were heading to the apartment - but Mercier got home from work at 11:50 p.m. before they arrived.
"When I entered that door, I see the wedding band in the blue books in front of the entrance door and I said, 'What is this? Is it a joke?'" she told The News.
Minutes later, her horrible cries startled neighbors.
"My kids! My kids! They're dead!" she screamed.
Bordes' brother said he had complained to his family that Mercier's relatives would conduct voodoo ceremonies - using candles and oils - whenever the couple fought.
"A couple months ago he mentioned something like that to me. Since I'm a Christian, I never took it seriously," Edouard Bordes said after identifying the bodies of his brother, niece and nephew at the city morgue.
"But we are all from Haiti, so we all know people who practice. We all recognize what it is," Bordes added.
"He was having problems with the mother of the children from time to time. I never think that he would go that far."
Mercier and Frantz Bordes had known each other for six years and had been living together the last two. Mercier said she knew for several years that he had another family in Haiti, including two teenage children. It was only recently that she found out about his third family in Queens and confronted him.
"He said, 'I'm going to change.' That was a big fat lie," she said. "Because I had a good heart, this is what happened to me."
"He was to be a home dad, he was good with them," she said. "If I'm at work, he would feed them. He played with them. He loved them."
But Mercier's brother, Phraner Mercier, remembered Bordes much differently. He said none of his family could stand his sister's do-nothing lover - and worried he would hurt the kids.
"He threatened to kill the kids before," the brother said. "He said if anyone took the kids, he would kill them."
With Nicole Bode and Oren Yaniv
Timeline to tragedy
Francoise Mercier was away from her Staten Island home for less than 10 hours. While she was gone Wednesday, her lover killed their helpless children and committed suicide.
2:20 p.m. Mercier, 43, leaves her house on Daniel Low Terrace and heads to her job at a nearby nursing home. Her lover, Frantz Bordes, 39, stays at home to care for their son and daughter.
8:14 p.m. Bordes kills himself by jumping in front of the Q train at the Church Ave. subway station in Brooklyn.
8:20 p.m. Unaware that Bordes is dead, Mercier calls home to check on her 4-year-old son, Sweitzer, and 2½-year-old daughter, Stephanie. No one answers the phone.
11:5O p.m. Mercier gets home and finds her kids drowned in the bathtub.
Topic: Diversity Demands: Segregate Now! (Read 9444 times)