(NEW YORK) — Three young children who police found unresponsive early Monday on the beach at New York’s Coney Island all died by drowning, the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner said Tuesday.

The manner of each of their deaths was ruled a homicide, the office determined.

Police detained the children’s mother, who is suspected of drowning them, authorities said.

The medical examiner’s findings will advance the investigation and help determine whether the mother, who remains hospitalized for evaluation, should be charged, officials said.

The grim discovery came at 4:42 a.m., about 90 minutes after police launched a frantic search for the children, whose 30-year-old mother was found soaking wet, barefoot and uncommunicative on the Coney Island Boardwalk, police officials said during a news conference. One official briefed on the probe told ABC News that the mother was “nearly catatonic” when police attempted to speak with her Monday morning.

Detectives are looking into whether postpartum depression played a role in the triple slaying, the official said.

Kenneth Corey, chief of department for the New York Police Department, said officers immediately performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the children, who were taken to Coney Island Hospital, where they were all pronounced dead. While autopsies will be conducted to determine the cause of death, police suspect the children died from drowning, officials said.

Corey described the children as a 7-year-old boy, a 4-year-old girl and a 3-month-old boy. Their names were not immediately released.

Corey said the incident unfolded around 1:40 a.m., when a relative called 911 and said she was concerned that the mother was going to harm the children.

“I believe she (the mother) had called them and made statements to that effect,” Corey said.

Officers went to the mother’s apartment in Coney Island, knocked on the door but got no answer, Corey said. While at the address, a man showed up and identified himself as the father of one of the children, who also expressed concern for the well-being of the children and told officers he believed the mother had taken them to the boardwalk.

Corey said police immediately launched a search of the mother’s apartment, which was unlocked, the boardwalk, the surrounding neighborhood and the beach. They found the mother on the boardwalk with other relatives, but her children were nowhere in sight.

“She was soaking wet, she was barefoot and she was not communicative to the officers,” Corey said.

He said the search for the children intensified with NYPD helicopters and boats being deployed.

Corey said the children were found unresponsive at the water’s edge near the boardwalk at W. 35th Street.

He said the mother was found about two miles from where police discovered her children.

Police said the deaths of the children appear to be premeditated and not something that occurred at the spur of a moment. Detectives are looking into the mother’s past and interviewing neighbors and relatives, officials said.

The mother has no prior arrests or history of being emotionally disturbed, according to NYPD records. She has prior domestic incidents of harassment and aggravated harassment that did not result in charges, according to the records.

“Best we can tell at this point, and again it’s preliminary, there is no indication of a prior history of abuse and neglect of these children,” Corey said.

Corey said the mother, whose name was not released, was detained for questioning, but has not been charged.

While police said they are investigating whether postpartum depression played a role in the episode, Dr. Anna Yegiants, a resident physician and member of the ABC News Medical Unit, explained there is a difference between postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.

Yegiants said that while it is possible for someone with postpartum depression to harm their children, it is not common. She said postpartum psychosis, however, presents essentially a break with reality and causes delusional thinking that could lead to such violence.

Up to 1 in 7 women experience postpartum depression, according to the American Psychological Association, and symptoms can occur during pregnancy and last for days or even months after delivering a baby.

“Postpartum depression is not your fault — it is a real, but treatable, psychological disorder,” the APA says on its website. “If you are having thoughts of hurting yourself or your baby, take action now: Put the baby in a safe place, like a crib. Call a friend or family member for help if you need to.”

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(NEW YORK) — Homeschooling, once a relatively niche form of education that has been growing steadily in the past decades, has seen a big uptick due to the COVID-19 pandemic with Black families adopting the practice at a notably high rate.

During the pandemic, the rates of families that home-schooled their children doubled, according to the most recent report released by the U.S. Census. In Black or African American households, the change was especially dramatic, going from 3% in the spring of 2020 to 16% by the fall.

Joyce Burges, co-founder of the National Black Home Educators association, based near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told ABC News the group had been seeing a “gradual increase in the number of Black families” homeschooling, but “with the pandemic it rose so incredibly.”

The reasons are multiple, she said, ranging from parents wanting to teach a more diverse curriculum to being able to better address the special needs of their children.

The numbers are just going to continue to increase, she said, adding that “education is not just brick and mortar, it will never go back to that again.”

Jania Otey told ABC News that there are myriad reasons why she home-schools her children, but ultimately she wants the children to “excel and progress.”

“We wanted them to be able to grasp a concept quickly or a subject matter,” she said. “We wanted to be able to move them on and build upon those things and not stay into one subject.”

For Otey, another rationale behind the decision to home-school Caleb and another son was “to provide a safe, engaging, healthy environment for our children.”

Although reports from the National Center for Education Statistics show the practice of home-schooling has been historically very white, the demographic shift is unsurprising for experts such as Cheryl Fields-Smith, professor of elementary education at the University of Georgia.

“Teachers are told what to teach, when to teach it, how to teach it, and that doesn’t always align with the students in the classroom,” Fields-Smith told ABC News.

The trends had already been set in place, but “the pandemic made it rise much more quickly.”

When she was first beginning her research, Fields-Smith said she was surprised to see Black families homeschooling, because she thought it was a predominantly white phenomenon.

“I was just blown away,” she said, learning about how Black families were adapting to make home-schooling work for them.

Similarly, Joyce Burges felt herself in the minority as a Black mother making the decision to home-school her children. She remembers vividly the joy at seeing another Black family at a home-schooling conference for the first time, more than 20 years ago.

Now, she can point to examples such as the parents of Venus and Serena Williams, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith as Black celebrities who have home-schooled their children.

Families can find resources and teaching lessons on “every subject,” she said, and she hopes to restart their conference series soon, through which Black families can hear about other parents’ experiences homeschooling.

Burges, who homeschooled her five children, said that it was ultimately “​​one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever had to make. But it was one of the best.”

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