Mother Whose Infant Twins Died in Car Released; Judge Hits Prosecutors

An Orange County woman whose infant twins died Sunday after being left unattended inside a sweltering car was freed from custody Friday after a judge blasted prosecutors for holding her without charges.

“I will never get over this,” the 25-year-old mother, Beverly Jean Ernst, said softly, her voice breaking, during a phone interview later from her home in Anaheim.

“I just wish everybody could understand how I feel,” she said. “I’m not perfect, but I’m not the horrible person they say I am. . . . I didn’t commit manslaughter. I loved those kids.”

Ernst, 25, was arrested Sunday in Garden Grove on suspicion of manslaughter and child endangerment for leaving her 3-month-old babies unattended in her closed and unshaded car. Firefighters said the temperature in the car could have exceeded 100 degrees.

She has not been formally charged with the deaths, but she spent six days in the Orange County Jail--the last two on a probation violation charge in a separate case. Officials in the Orange County district attorney’s office said they asked the Anaheim city attorney’s office to file the probation case to keep Ernst in custody.

They said they feared that Ernst would flee the area before they could complete their investigation into the infants’ deaths.

In March, Ernst was convicted of resisting arrest, a misdemeanor, stemming from an argument with her mother and was sentenced to three years’ probation. Prosecutors said she violated her probation, which states that she should not break the law, by virtue of her arrest Sunday.

North Orange County Municipal Judge Margaret R. Anderson granted a request Friday by Ernst’s public defender to release the woman on her own recognizance.

“I felt she had been in custody long enough,” Anderson said after the hearing.

During the hearing, David Byron, Anaheim deputy city attorney, argued that Ernst’s bail remain at $5,000 because the district attorney’s office is still investigating the case and may file charges against her.

But Anderson refused the request, stating that she would not order Ernst be held merely “for the purposes of investigation.”

‘That Is Incorrect’

“The only condition here should have been what was the bail going to be on this probation matter,” Anderson said, “not whether the district attorney’s office was going to charge her with something else. . . . If the only reason the city attorney filed this charge was to keep (Ernst) in custody for the district attorney’s office, than I feel that is incorrect. It’s an incorrect application of the law.

“But for the district attorney not being able to hold her on his own charge, she wouldn’t be in jail at all. I just didn’t like the way this whole thing was done, and I won’t be a party to holding this woman like this.”

Since Anderson saw no evidence that Ernst would fail to appear in court on the probation violation charge, she ordered the woman freed.