Amber Pasztor had just crossed the Michigan border in a stolen Mercury Mystique when she first heard the alert. Authorities were looking for her children, 7-year-old Liliana Hernandez and 6-year-old Rene Pasztor, who were reported missing earlier in the day.
The children were with her, riding in the back seat. Pasztor had taken them from their grandfather’s house in Fort Wayne, Ind., early that morning and set off on an aimless drive, stopping at a restaurant and a park before crossing the state line into Michigan.
When the alert came in, Pasztor said, she decided to kill them. But before she did, she asked them one final question.
“I gave them a choice,” she said. “That they can live traumatized like their mom, or they can go to heaven with God and be better off.”
Pasztor said she took her daughter’s life first, covering her mouth and nose with her hands until she stopped breathing. Then she did the same to her son, she said.
“He wanted to go with her,” Pasztor said.
Pasztor’s harrowing account of the slayings came Monday in
an exclusive interview with WANE, in which the 29-year-old mother admitted to abducting and smothering her children late last month, in a case that triggered a statewide Amber Alert and manhunt that ended when Pasztor turned herself in. In the interview, Pasztor also confessed to shooting and killing her 65-year-old neighbor, Frank Macomber, and stealing his car after promising him sex and convincing him to go camping with her.
A coroner determined the children died of asphyxiation and ruled their deaths homicides. Pasztor is being held in Elkhart County Jail without bond on two charges of murder until her trial date early next year. Last week a judge entered a not guilty plea on her behalf and appointed a public defender to represent her,
according to the Indianapolis Star. She had not been charged in Macomber’s death as of Monday night.
Pasztor’s children had been living for about a year with her father, Rick Green, who was their legal guardian, according to WANE. Green
told the station in September that Pasztor had struggled with drug addiction, but said the children had a “promising future” under his roof, where he considered himself their father. He said they were both baseball fans who enjoyed the outdoors and playing in the swimming pool.
“We took in her kids because she had problems,” Green said. “I’ve grown to love them very much.”
Pasztor lived across town in a mobile home, which one neighbor said was pockmarked with holes where Pasztor had stabbed it repeatedly with a butcher knife. The neighbor, Gloria Hughett, told the
Indianapolis Star that Pasztor’s behavior was erratic and sometimes menacing, and that her conversations often turned to her children.
“She wanted her kids back,” Hughett said. “She talked about it a lot.”
On Sept. 26, shortly after 6 a.m., Pasztor said, she drove to her father’s house, pushed the front door open and grabbed Liliana and Rene. She put them into Macomber’s 1999 Mercury Mystique and took off driving.
It’s not clear whether Macomber was alive and with her at the time, but days earlier she had persuaded him to go on a camping trip with her, saying she wanted to have sex with him. She told WANE that she lured him to a wooded area in Fort Wayne and shot him once with his own gun, killing him. She said she was about 10 feet away when she pulled the trigger and that he was not looking at her.
“I aimed the gun one time and shot him,” Pasztor said. “I don’t even know how I had an aim in me like that, but I did. I’m not proud of it.”
Pasztor drove north through Indiana in Macomber’s car, her children in the back seat. During the trip, she made several stops, including at a restaurant and a park, the
Star reported.