Marilyn Edge of Santa Ana was supposed to turn over custody of her two children to her ex-husband in Georgia on a Sunday, according to court documents.

She didn’t.

Edge is accused of killing her two children, Jaelen and Faith. A custody battle that raged around the children for years had just been settled. The court had ruled for Marilyn to hand over custody of their children to her husband, and when she heard the news, she abruptly walked out of the courtroom. Edge was supposed to be packing up her children’s books and pencils back in Cobb County, Georgia, making their breakfast, and getting them off to school.

Instead, she was charged with two accounts of “special circumstances” murder (murder that can lead to the death penalty) the Monday after. She told police Jaelen and Faith were in the Hampton Inn & Suites in Santa Ana. Police went to the hotel to find they were, in fact, deceased, and prosecutors allege that they were poisoned.

After she left the hotel, Edge tried to kill herself by crashing her car behind a shopping center. Police broke into her car as she tried to strangle herself with an electrical cord.

“We were shocked, we expected her to run,” said Marian Weeks, the children’s father’s attorney. “We never expected her to do this.”

Edge appeared in court on the Tuesday the week after she was charged and asked the judge for the death penalty. She had her arraignment postponed until Oct. 25.

According to some experts, mothers who kill their children are not as rare as we’d like to think. While the exact numbers of children killed by their mothers is hard to pinpoint, some experts estimate a child is killed by their mother every few days in this country, at least 100 times a year. The reasons mothers kill their children can vary. Some mothers may ignore or hide pregnancies, some may abuse or neglect their children, and some may be victims of domestic violence.

Although it’s not clear why Edge went down this path, she will (unless something unexpected happens) be getting the death penalty.