Mother, 26, Convicted in Deaths of Infant Twins

A 26-year-old Anaheim woman was convicted Thursday of two counts of felony child endangerment in the deaths of her twin infants, who died of heatstroke after she left them unattended in her car for five hours last summer in Garden Grove.

After a three-week trial, the Orange County Superior Court jury was unable to reach a verdict on additional charges of involuntary manslaughter, deadlocking 9 to 3 in favor of conviction. A mistrial was declared on those charges.

Beverly Jean Ernst, who left the courtroom in tears after the verdict, was ordered to return June 19 for sentencing by Superior Court Judge Jean H. Rheinheimer. She faces a maximum sentence of 7 years and 3 months in prison. Deputy Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade said no decision had been made on whether to retry her on the manslaughter charges.

Several jurors said afterward that any sympathy they felt for Ernst, who wept often during the trial, was overshadowed by their heartache over the deaths of the 3-month-old victims, Adam and Ashley.

“You don’t ever leave infants alone in a car--ever,” said one juror, Karileen Vail of Cypress, who said she has two children.

Visit to Coffee Shop

According to testimony at the trial, Ernst and a boyfriend, Scott Morrow, went to a coffee shop with the infants about 3 a.m. on July 20, 1986, and returned shortly after 7 a.m. to a supply shop on Euclid Street where Morrow was living.

Both testified that Ernst left the twins in the car and went inside the shop at Morrow’s invitation. Both fell asleep on a bed, according to the testimony, and neither woke up until shortly after noon, when the owner of the store, Leonard Wosic, entered.

Pathology reports showed that the children died no later than 10:30 a.m. The temperature inside the car, which had one window open about two inches, may have reached 120, according to evidence introduced at the trial.

Ernst testified that she did not take the infants inside the shop because it was dirty and she meant to stay only a few minutes. She said she did not mean to fall asleep but only to lie on the bed to rest for a few minutes. She also said Morrow had agreed to “listen” for the children for her.

Some of the jurors said her intentions, and whatever promise Morrow might have made to watch the children, did not justify her conduct.

“What mother takes her children to a coffee shop at 3 o’clock in the morning?” asked juror Margaret Andras of Huntington Beach. “We felt there was a pattern of reckless behavior on her part. It was very poor conduct for a mother.”

Good Intentions

One of the three who held out for a verdict of not guilty on the involuntary manslaughter charges was the jury foreman, Nick Veres of Garden Grove, a grandfather. Veres said he and two other jurors, a man and a woman, thought Ernst’s good intentions when she entered the supply shop saved her from a guilty verdict on those charges.

Throughout the trial, Deputy Public Defender Dennis P. O’Connell depicted his client as a victim of circumstances. In his closing argument, he asked jurors to consider Ernst’s plight at the time of the deaths.

She was not living with the twins’ father, who has not been publicly identified. She had been forced to leave her mother’s home and was being forced out of a friend’s house where she had been staying. The day she went to Morrow’s shop, she was trying to find a job and a place for her and the twins to live.

“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.

July 6 Hearing

The district attorney’s office could ask for a new trial on the involuntary manslaughter charges. Rheinheimer set a July 6 date for a hearing on that issue. Even if she is ultimately convicted on those counts, any sentence would be concurrent with the child-endangerment sentence.

Ernst was in jail for six days after her arrest the day the babies died. Since then she has been free without bail and has returned to live with her mother. O’Connell said she is unemployed.

Ernst has two other children, ages 5 and 6, who live with her former in-laws in Illinois.