Brittany Pilkington was charged with three counts of murder and was jailed, said police in Bellefontaine, about 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) northwest of Columbus.

Pilkington, who's 23 years old, is accused in Tuesday's death of three-month-old Noah Pilkington and in the deaths of four-year-old Gavin Pilkington, who died in April, and three-month-old Niall Pilkington, who died in July 2014. No working telephone number for the family's home could be found, and no attorney information was available for the mother.

Police said officers went to the family's apartment on Tuesday morning after an emergency call from the mother saying that Noah wasn't breathing. They said she calmly answered a dispatcher's questions while the baby's sleep apnea alarm beeped in the background. The baby was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Logan County prosecutor William Goslee told The Columbus Dispatch that he interviewed Brittany Pilkington on Tuesday and that she confessed to killing each of her sons by placing a blanket over their heads and suffocating them.

"In her mind," Goslee said, "she was protecting her daughter from being not as loved as the boys were by their father."

The daughter, three-year-old Hailey Pilkington, was taken into custody by a county child welfare agency.

Authorities already were investigating what happened to Niall and Gavin, whose causes of death still hadn't been determined. In each of those cases, their father, Joseph Pilkington, found them unresponsive when he got home from work.

"Our son's not breathing," Brittany Pilkington said meekly to a dispatcher when she called police on April 6 as her husband frantically gave Gavin chest compressions. "He's turning white."

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