No Charges Filed in Drowning of Twins : Tragedy: Their parents did nothing to directly cause the chldren’s death in a neighbor’s pool, D.A.’s office says.

The parents of identical twins who drowned in a Tujunga neighbor’s pool last week will not face criminal child-endangerment charges, Los Angeles County district attorney’s officials said Monday.

Spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said investigators lacked evidence that Diane and George Gugler contributed directly to the deaths of their sons, Tyler and Quinn, who were 2 years old. Gibbons also revealed that a rear gate to the pool area was found propped open with a brick, possibly by neighborhood teen-agers, enabling the twins to enter the fenced-in pool area.

“For criminal charges, there has to be a causational act that causes the death or injury” and there was no evidence of such an act by the children’s parents, Gibbons said.

“There was an unforeseeable act of leaving the gate open, and the parents didn’t do that, they didn’t know about it,” Gibbons said.

John L. Simonson, an attorney and family friend who has acted as the Guglers’ spokesman, said the district attorney’s decision not to press charges exonerated the couple, who came under investigation because of neighbors’ allegations that the twins often wandered into their yards and near busy streets, apparently unsupervised.

Simonson said the allegations against the Guglers were unfounded and caused them further grief after the youngest of their five children died. The twins were buried Saturday, he said.

“When allegations like this happen on top of this terrible tragedy, it has infused emotions that are so conflicting and so magnified that it’s just devastating,” Simonson said.

The twins’ father discovered them in the Grenoble Street pool of neighbors Donald and Francys Abbott last Wednesday evening after he returned from a jog and learned that they were missing from their own yard on Silverton Avenue. He had left them playing with their 9-year-old brother. The children’s mother had been inside their home, police said.

Hours earlier, one neighbor called police and the county’s child-abuse hot line because the twins had wandered onto his second-story patio and climbed precariously on a railing. The neighbor, himself a father of three, said he was told that hot-line workers were busy and, unless it was an emergency, would call him back.

A spokesman for the Department of Children’s Services, Schuyler Sprowles, said Monday that the agency was continuing an internal investigation into how the neighbor’s call was handled. Hot-line workers tried calling back three times on the afternoon he called, Sprowles said. They finally reached the neighbor Thursday morning, when he told them the twins were dead.

Sprowles also said the department had found no record of earlier complaints about the Guglers.

Los Angeles police detectives declined to comment on the decision not to pursue charges. Lt. Thomas (Reggie) Maeweather, assistant commander of detectives at the Foothill Division, said police were still checking their own phone records to determine whether they had received earlier calls about the Guglers.