Mother of Twins ‘Did Best She Could,’ Defense Insists

Beverly Jean Ernst’s attorney called the death of her twin infants in her car last July “a terribly sad accident” but insisted to jurors Monday that the Anaheim woman “did the best she could with the means she had at her disposal.”

Ernst, 26, is on trial in West Orange County Superior Court in Westminster on two counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of felony child endangerment. Her 3-month-old twins, Adam and Ashley, died July 20, 1986, after being left alone in a car.

According to testimony at the trial, Ernst and a boyfriend, Scott Morrow, left the twins in her car at about 7 a.m., when they went inside a Garden Grove supply shop where he lived and slept past noon. Autopsy reports showed that the babies died from the heat no later than 10:30 a.m., nearly two hours before they were discovered.

Ernst claims that she went inside the supply shop at Morrow’s invitation after being awake all night and fell asleep by accident. She testified that she thought the children would be all right because Morrow had promised he would “listen” for them while she rested for a few minutes.

In closing arguments Monday, her attorney, Deputy Public Defender Dennis P. O’Connell, asked jurors to consider her situation. She was caring for the children alone, he said, while trying to find a job and a place for them all to live. And, he said, she had been forced out of an apartment where she was living with friends.

“She was with those babies 24 hours a day. Is that the conduct of a woman who would walk into that shop totally oblivious to the welfare of her children?” O’Connell asked the jurors.

In O’Connell’s view, Morrow had made an agreement to watch the twins while Ernst rested, and he said she had not meant to rest long. Ernst was certainly aware, he said, that the children would be in danger if she left them in the car for several hours.

O’Connell told jurors that it was not unreasonable conduct for her to leave the twins outside, under the circumstances she expected.

“If she had said, ‘I’m going to sleep for five hours; the kids can stay outside in the heat--I don’t care,’ then, yes, that would be gross negligence.”

But the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade, told jurors that if that had happened, “she would be charged with murder, not involuntary manslaughter. We’ve never said Beverly Ernst didn’t love her children. But she didn’t do enough, or care enough, on that occasion, to remove them to a position of safety.”

Wade argued that it wasn’t fair to blame Morrow, the boyfriend. He may have contributed to what happened, Wade said, but Ernst’s asking him to “listen” for the twins in the car while she slept “is not enough.”

Jurors began deliberating Monday afternoon and will continue their deliberations today.