Home Alone--It’s No Rarity in Los Angeles : Abuse: A crack-addicted mother is sent to jail after one of her three children--all left unattended for three days--draws attention while begging for food.

At first, when his mother left him, Brian Hernandez would lie. “She is at work,” he told the neighbors. “She is shopping. She is asleep.”

But the neighbors knew better. They took in her glazed eyes and slurred speech. They watched as Brian sold the radio and TV for food.

By the time the 8-year-old boy began begging door to door, there were no excuses left.

“I am hungry,” he said. “The baby needs milk. I don’t know where my mother is.”

On Wednesday--six days after the manager of the Pico-Union complex saw all he could bear and finally called police--the little boy’s crack-addicted mother, Brenda Hernandez, 30, was convicted in Los Angeles Municipal Court on child endangerment charges.

Authorities said she had left her three children alone--this time--for three days with neither money nor food. Police said Hernandez told them she had been on a cocaine binge.

“I guess it’s news now, but this is not an isolated neglect case,” said Detective Charles Flippo of the Los Angeles Police Department. “We get a couple of these a month.”

Nonetheless, the case--reminiscent of Chicago’s notorious “Home Alone” arrests--shocked the residents of the apartment house where Hernandez and her three children lived in the 1700 block of West 9th Street.

“It was criminal. Criminal,” said the manager, Jorge Luis Giron, who said Brian struggled mightily to provide for his two baby brothers--one a 2-year-old, the other an infant born Christmas Day.

“The little guy was at the door every day,” Giron said. “Every day, he asked, ‘Can you give me three dollars or two dollars or one dollar for dinner?’ Every day, you would see him and his brother out in the street.”

Giron said about 50 children live in the apartment house, whose tenants are mostly impoverished Central Americans. Tenants said they look out for each other as best they can, but the Hernandez children were an especially heart-wrenching group.

“Brian was always sad,” said 11-year-old Roel Ventura, gliding across the apartment house’s tattered lobby on a yellow and black skateboard.

“I gave him shoes, shirts, candy money. Everything. Once I even gave him my pants. I cut the legs of them off so they would fit him, cause he was smaller. I didn’t want to see him all dirty.”

Concern for children left at home alone reached new peaks last month when a Chicago-area couple were arrested for leaving their daughters, ages 9 and 4, at home alone while they spent the holiday at a resort in Mexico.

Public sentiment ran so heavily against the couple that, when they were taken into custody at O’Hare Airport, passersby jeered and swore at them.

But child protective workers said such situations are common in urban areas for a variety of reasons, ranging from a lack of money for child care to a mistaken belief that children can take care of themselves to substance abuse problems that impair a parent’s judgment.

“People leave their kids alone all the time in this city. It happens constantly,” said Sharyn Logan, deputy director of the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services. “The only difference is, their parents are not usually middle-class families in the suburbs. And they’re not on vacation in Acapulco.”

Giron said Hernandez and her family, for example, could barely afford their $350-a-month studio apartment. They had lived in the building on and off since September, he said. But he added that Hernandez had been evicted twice because she failed to pay the rent.

On many occasions, he and others said, her children were in the apartment alone. Sometimes a sister watched them. Other times they were supervised by an uncle who lived outside in his car. But by January, he said, the family had become a concern to everyone in the building.

One night, after he spotted Brian and his 2-year-old brother, Manuel, hanging around the neighborhood liquor store, Giron decided to call the police.

“I said the babies are in the street, and the mother is not here, and the police said they would come,” Giron said. But when a patrol car finally arrived three hours later, he said, the mother had been located in another apartment.

A few days later, however, Giron heard the baby crying--a sound that did not stop for two hours. When he went to the apartment, he said, he found the 2-year-old lying in bed with a fever. The apartment was filthy and without food.

Dirty clothes and trash were heaped in the bathroom. There was a lamp with no shade. The infant’s diaper was dirty and his nightshirt reeked of vomit.

This time, Hernandez was still gone when the police arrived. She didn’t return until 11 a.m. the following day.

On Wednesday, Hernandez pleaded guilty to charges that she had endangered her sons. Municipal Court Commissioner Linda P. Elliott sentenced her to 120 days in jail and three years on probation.