Parents Not to Be Charged in Twins’ Deaths : Tujunga: The toddlers’ drownings last week had prompted allegations that they often wandered unsupervised into yards and near busy streets.

The parents of identical Tujunga twins who drowned in a 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 1/2. 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 precocious 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 Diane Gugler, a homemaker, and George Gugler, a set artist for film studios, 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 on Wednesday evening after he returned from a jog and found them missing from their yard on Silverton Avenue, where he had left them playing with their 9-year-old brother. The children’s mother was 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 wooden railing. The neighbor, the father of three, said he was told that hot-line workers were busy and would call him back if there was no emergency.

Schuyler Sprowles, a spokesman for the Department of Children’s Services, 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 that the neighbor called, Sprowles said. They finally reached the neighbor Thursday morning and he told them that 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 phone records to determine whether they received earlier calls about the Guglers.

Detectives on Monday reiterated that their investigation was influenced by the concerns of neighbors, a majority of whom told homicide detectives that the Gugler twins lacked adequate supervision.

“About 98% of the people we spoke to showed concern about neglect on the part of the family,” homicide Detective Al Ferrand said.

Officers who responded to the emergency call found a gate propped open as they toured the pool with its owner. Detective Frank Bishop said one theory of how the accident occurred is that neighborhood teen-agers tampered with the gate. But he said investigators have been unable to determine who may have done that.

“We know the owner didn’t do it,” Bishop said.

Pool owner Donald Abbott, an 81-year-old retired aerospace engineer, said Monday that the gate was closed about 4:30 p.m. when he went outside to check a rain gauge.