Life Not an Easy One for Struggling Mother

It was a battle for Beverly Jean Ernst when her twins--a surprise--were born nearly two months early. And things didn’t get much easier before they were left unattended in a hot car last weekend and died.

Ashley and Adam Ernst struggled to survive in their first few weeks of life, plagued by respiratory ailments common to premature babies. When Ernst finally brought them home from the hospital, she said she woke up hourly during the night to check their breathing and pulse because she was unable to obtain a special heart monitor.

Ernst had no job, no permanent home. Last Sunday morning she was packing up her old Chevrolet with strollers, clothing and unopened baby gifts for still another move to a friend’s house. She had relinquished custody of her daughter by a previous marriage a few weeks ago.

“But we made it,” Ernst said Friday, her voice dropping to a whisper, her words trailing off. “Everything is hard in life, no matter what we do. Nothing is easy; I don’t know anything that is.

“This, I’ll never get over this. . . . Right now I could, I feel like I need a hug from my kids right about now.”

Instead, the unemployed divorcee--whose older children were on a previously scheduled vacation with grandparents in Illinois--planned to talk with 4-year-old Sarah and 6-year-old Kenneth long-distance.

She spent the rest of Friday making plans to bury her newborns.

Ernst’s fate remains in doubt, despite her release by a judge Friday morning after spending six days in Orange County Jail.

Not Criminally Charged

Although she has not been criminally charged, the Orange County district attorney’s office is still investigating the deaths of her twins. The babies died Sunday in Garden Grove, after she left them in her car with only one window cracked open an inch. Firefighters said the temperature in the car could have risen to 120 degrees.

Police and firefighters estimated the twins were left in the car at least an hour while Ernst visited a friend at a closed janitorial supply store. Dennis P. O’Connell, the public defender representing Ernst because she is indigent, said Friday he believes that the babies were in the car no longer than 15 or 20 minutes.

On the advice of her attorney, Ernst declined to talk about the circumstances leading up to the deaths of the two infants.

“I have nothing to run away from,” she said, her words intermittently strong and then wavering. “I’m not guilty of the crimes they say I am. Why should I run? . . . I’m going to fight this thing to the end. I’m not angry. I’m just upset that they would accuse me of such horrible things. . . . People treat you like you’re such a horrible person, but you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Since Sunday night, Ernst has done her grieving behind bars, alone in a cell because authorities were concerned that other inmates had heard about the tragedy and might try to harm her.

Inmates’ Reaction

Most of the inmates she encountered, Ernst said, were those she passed going to and from adjoining court holding cells. “They spit on me when I walked by. The women in the cell beside me called me a baby killer.” Another woman in the jail passed her a Scripture, she said.

Because the jail does not allow visitors on Mondays and Tuesdays, Ernst’s only contact with relatives was by way of a pay phone.

“I was going crazy,” Ernst said of the incarceration.

“They wouldn’t give me cigarettes. When they finally gave me cigarettes, then they wouldn’t give me matches. They were afraid I was going to commit suicide. I wasn’t going to commit suicide. I was there six days and they wouldn’t give me a shower. I didn’t have any clean clothes. Then I could have felt like half a human being. . . . I’d wash my socks and underwear every night in my wash basin just so they’d be clean the next day.”

Since Sunday, Ernst had been wearing the jail-issued jeans, yellow cotton shirt and gray sweat shirt she wore into court Friday morning. In arguing that Ernst was a bail risk because she had no permanent address, a prosecutor alleged that she had been thrown out of her mother’s house--he did not say why--and out of the home of a friend she had been staying with until Sunday.

Reason for Moving

Ernst did not want to discuss the incident except to say: “I was never thrown out of my house, or (her friend) Judy’s house.”

She was moving out of that home Sunday, she said, because the owner was threatening to evict her friends because there were too many occupants, a statement Judy Fraser, who grew up with Ernst, confirmed.

As Ernst waited Friday for the county coroner to release the bodies of her twins, her friends as well as her attorney expressed concern that she is surely blaming herself.

“I would imagine she is feeling a lot of guilt,” said O’Connell, the public defender. “I’m sure she wishes she could turn the clock back a few days.”