A Nevada mother who told cops and hospital staffers she drowned her two young children has worked for a child welfare agency for three years, county officials said Thursday.
Jovan Paris Trevino, 33, was arrested Tuesday at a hospital in Bullhead City, Arizona, where she voluntarily admitted herself for treatment and confessed to killing her 1-year-old daughter, Gihanna Fox, and 4-year-old son, Christopher Fox III, according to an arrest report obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The bodies of the children were found Monday in their Henderson home — along with a suicide note written by Trevino. She had downed over-the-counter medicine and alcohol before going to her son’s bedroom and duping him to get into a tub, police said.
“Jovan tricked Christopher into playing on his stomach in the bathtub by giving him a pair of glasses and using them to see better underwater,” detectives wrote.
Trevino then used her leg to pin her son beneath the water, killing him “within three to four minutes” before drowning Gihanna in a bathtub in a master bedroom, police said.
Trevino attempted suicide after the slayings, but left the home in her car. Authorities later found a suicide note on Trevino’s unlocked phone saying she could not “walk off this Earth and leave my precious children behind,” KTNV reported.
A large knife and a bloodied towel were also discovered in a master bedroom, the station reported.
Trevino had been sought since the children’s father called cops to her home because “things did not seem right,” according to the police report.
The mother, who waived extradition to Nevada during a court hearing Wednesday, has worked for the Clark County Department of Family Services since July 2019, county officials told the Review-Journal.
She’s been employed full-time as a family services assistant, earning nearly $39,000 annually for completing paperwork, helping families apply for assistance and monitoring visitations. She previously served as a family services specialist part-time between January 2018 and June 2019, county spokesman Erik Pappa told the newspaper.
An online fundraiser set up by Christopher Fox to offset his children’s burial costs has garnered more than $14,000 as of Thursday.
“We lost both my kids to an unnecessary crime,” the website reads. “Christopher and Gihanna were our lovely kids and just made our days better by just looking at them smile.”
Trevino, meanwhile, had previously sought full custody of the children in a filing against Fox, claiming a history of domestic violence. The couple had lived together, but weren’t married, the Review-Journal reported.
Trevino told cops at the hospital she decided to kill herself Sunday, but didn’t initially make up her mind whether she would take her children’s lives as well. She then decided early Monday to kill her children and then herself, according to KTNV.