Reading of Ernst Brother’s Earlier Statements Allowed

With the brother of a woman on trial in the deaths of her twin infants still missing Tuesday, a Superior Court judge finally agreed to let prosecutors read to the jury Steven Ernst’s testimony from a previous hearing.

Ernst, brother of 26-year-old Beverly Jean Ernst, previously testified that he had warned his sister before about leaving the twins unattended in her car in hot weather.

Beverly Jean Ernst is charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of felony child endangerment for leaving her 3-month-old twins in the car, with the windows rolled up, for five hours on July 20, 1986, while she and a boyfriend slept in a nearby air-conditioned storeroom in Garden Grove.

The woman claims that the boyfriend, Scott Morrow, had promised to watch the twins while she took a short nap, then fell asleep himself. Morrow has denied making such a promise.

Steven Ernst was to be the last prosecution witness in the two-week-long trial, but he has been unavailable every time prosecutors have tried to subpoena him.

He was at South Coast Medical Center in South Laguna last week but then was discharged after learning that prosecutors were trying to subpoena him, according to testimony on Monday and Tuesday.

Superior Court Judge Jean H. Rheinheimer said Monday that she was concerned about whether the prosecution’s efforts to find Steven Ernst had been diligent enough to warrant letting prosecutors read his previous testimony instead of producing the witness himself.

The defense had argued that Steven Ernst was never given any message that prosecutors needed him to come to the trial. But Tuesday, hospital social worker Nancy Price testified that Steven Ernst asked her last week: “Can they subpoena me if I’m in the hospital?”

It was shortly after that testimony that Judge Rheinheimer sided with the prosecution and allowed Steven Ernst’s testimony from his sister’s preliminary hearing to be read to jurors.

“If I have erred, I have done so in good faith,” the judge said following a two-day hearing on the issue.

Judge Rheinheimer said the prosecution’s efforts to place the brother under subpoena after they had learned that he was in the hospital appeared to be sufficient. She also noted the argument by Deputy Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade that prosecutors were not more diligent in pursuing the brother at the hospital because they were trying to show reasonable cooperation with hospital authorities.

Wade called the judge’s ruling “an important one.” While two other witnesses said they warned Beverly Jean Ernst about the danger of leaving the twins alone in the car, only Steven Ernst had warned his sister that it was the car’s heat that made such actions dangerous.

Beverly Jean Ernst’s defense is scheduled to begin Thursday.