NEW YORK -- Knil Jean Noel was supposed to be celebrating his ninth birthday with a pizza party at school.
He never got there. His troubled mother, Olivia Jean Noel, smothered Knil with a pillow in the family's Brooklyn apartment, according to police. After trying to kill herself by jumping in front of a subway train, she was arrested Tuesday on murder and other charges.
She told detectives that "demons overtook her," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
Police said the mother told them the trouble began when her son woke up Monday morning still upset that a playmate hadn't come to his family birthday dinner the night before.
She told detectives she called the boy over to her bed and killed him, Kelly said.
The boy's father was at work at the time, police said. They said Jean Noel warned him during a telephone conversation: "You're going to have to forgive me."
After the slaying, she became "extremely remorseful" and boarded a subway to Manhattan, thinking she might jump off a bridge, Kelly said.
She instead returned to Brooklyn, where she jumped in front of a train at a Coney Island station. Police said she suffered a broken leg and severed fingers but never lost consciousness, telling officers at the scene, "I did something terrible to my son."
The boy's father, Evans Joseph, discovered Knil's body about 30 minutes later in the family's third-floor apartment in Crown Heights.
"He was my life," the distraught father said later.
Police said the boy's mother, who remained hospitalized Tuesday, had been treated for depression. But one of the boy's aunts, Lusca Joseph, said the family never knew of any problems.
She said the couple, both observant Seventh Day Adventists, met in their native St. Lucia. Knil was their only child, she said.
"(Jean Noel) was a good mother. She was great," Lusca Joseph said. "I don't know what had driven her to do something like this."
At Knil's school, Montgomery Academy, he was remembered as a bright and sociable student.
"He was well-loved," said the boy's teacher, William Ebanks. He said Knil would quiz him frequently about new facts he just had learned.
The boy left school Friday ebullient about his upcoming birthday party, said Principal Earlene Warren-Fernandez.
Added another of the boy's aunts, Jennifer James: "He was a nice little kid -- very jubilant, very smart. To be honest, he was a child every parent would want to have."
Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed
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