Mother Guilty in Fire Deaths of 3 Children : Trial: Jo Ann Banks was accused of setting two blazes. She could receive the death penalty.

A 26-year-old woman was found guilty Tuesday of killing her three small children in their Bell home by setting two fires in 1989.

“Fire was the weapon of choice to execute her children,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Dinko Bozanich.

Jo Ann Parks faces the death penalty or a life sentence without the possibility of parole for committing the multiple murders.

The Norwalk Superior Court jury took about two days to reach its decision after a six-week trial. The same jury will begin hearing evidence about a week from now in the penalty phase of the trial.

Parks’ attorney, Deputy Public Defender Charles Gessler, said he was “very disappointed” at the verdict but hopeful that she will not receive the death penalty.

After a fire erupted at the Parks’ home in April, 1989, firefighters found Jessica Amber Parks, 1, and her sister, RoAnn, 2, dead in their bedroom. Their brother, Ronald Edwards Parks III, 4, was found huddled in his bedroom closet, as if he had tried to escape the heat of the flames. A clothes hamper blocked the closet door.

Parks said in interviews that she tried to reach her children after hearing their screams but heat finally forced her from the home.

The fire was not the first involving Jo Ann and Ronald Parks, her 45-year-old husband. Just a year before, the family was burned out of a rental house in Lynwood. No one was injured in that blaze. However, Parks was quoted in court documents at the time as saying that if her husband “had come home five minutes later, Jessica would be dead and we would be rich.”

Fire investigators attributed the Lynwood fire to an overload on an electrical cord. After the Bell fire, officials discovered a piece of electrical cord that looked as if the insulation had been cut from the wire.

The Parkses then moved to St. Louis to be near Ronald Parks’ ailing father. Police arrested her in 1991 at a nursing home where she was a caretaker.