A Texas mother is accused of bashing her three sons, killing two of them.

TYLER, Texas (AP) – A woman accused of fatally beating two of her sons with rocks spent Mother’s Day sobbing and muttering in a jail cell.

Deanna LaJune Laney, 38, remained on a suicide watch Monday at Smith County Jail, where she was held in lieu of $3 million bond on capital murder and aggravated assault charges.

Laney is accused of killing Joshua Laney, 8, and Luke Laney, 6, and injuring their 14-month-old brother, Aaron. Aaron remained in critical condition early Monday at a Dallas Hospital.

In a call to emergency workers early Saturday, Laney reported that she had just “bashed their heads in with a rock,” Sheriff J.B. Smith said.

When they arrived at the home, sheriff’s deputies found Joshua and Luke dead in the yard wearing only their underwear, large rocks on top of their bodies. Aaron was found in his crib with a pillow over his face, alive but bleeding.

Wearing bloodstained pajamas, Laney told the first deputy on the scene “I had to” when he took her into custody, according to an arrest affidavit obtained by the Tyler Morning Telegraph.

Smith said Laney acted erratically Sunday during interviews with investigators.

“Sometimes she is incoherent, sometimes she’s in a fetal position and sobbing. Sometimes she’s singing spiritual hymns or muttering about God and sometimes she has a flatliner (poker) face and not saying a thing during interviews,” Smith said. “But she has not spoken of the crime anymore. She said it all on the 911 tape. She said she had killed her children.”

Laney, he said, claimed that God ordered her to kill her sons. The boys’ deaths were announced Sunday to more than 200 members of the First Assembly of God Church, where Laney sang in the choir and her brother-in-law, Gary Bell, is the pastor.

Bell told his parishioners that he and his wife, Judy, would stand behind Laney.

“This was a brutal and horrific incident that has changed our lives (and will) for years to come,” Bell said. “But we all believe as a family that this wasn’t our Dee that did this to her children.”

Another Texas woman, Andrea Yates of Houston, confessed to drowning her five children in a bathtub in June 2001 and was convicted of murder. The jury rejected defense pleas that Yates was innocent by reason of insanity.

She was sentenced to life in prison and is not eligible for parole until 2041.

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