Aleah Newell, a 20-year-old American from Chicago, is accused of a brutal murder of her two children. According to national media, she stabbed her grandfather and jumped out of the tenth-floor window herself. She survived the fall.

It is not clear what inspired the woman on Thursday. Two days before, on New Year’s Eve, she had asked her mother to come and pick up her two sons so that she “could get her life back on track.” But on Wednesday Aleah Newell and her children, Johntavis (2) and Ameer (7 months) turned out not to be home.

Early Thursday morning she had a hot bath filled with her grandfather Cordell Walker (70) in Chicago, while her sons were in the living room of the apartment. Her grandfather had to go to the toilet and entered the bathroom.

Aleah Newell hit him on the head with a towel rack, went to get a knife in the kitchen and stabbed it more than ten times. Then the woman went to her son, barely seven months old, Ameer, and gave him nineteen knife stitches.

Then she grabbed her other son and threw him out of the tenth-floor window. Then she jumped after him. Her fall was interrupted by the working platform of a window washer on the second floor. That’s how she stayed alive.

Her toddler son was lying dead on the sidewalk, and her baby had also died in the bath. The grandfather did survive the attack on his life.

Aleah Newell has now been charged with the double murder of her children and attempted murder of her grandfather. The judge said her actions “witnessed willful cruelty” and refused any provisional release on bail. Newell is still in the hospital with a broken wrist and ankle.