Toddler, Infant Die Alone in Stifling Fresno Apartment

The bodies, a baby face up in a crib and a toddler wedged beneath a bed, were discovered Sunday night in the 96-degree apartment, the windows shut and the air conditioning clicked off.

Investigators said the two young sisters were left alone for four days inside a stifling Fresno apartment while their mother went searching for drugs. Police surmise that the girls succumbed to dehydration one day after being abandoned during a 105-degree heat wave.

“They died in a closed-up apartment on the hottest day of the year while their mother was out looking for drugs,” Fresno Police Lt. Jerry Davis, the head of homicide, said Monday.

“We’re still trying to trace her movements, but it appears that she was gone from the apartment from Wednesday to Sunday.”

The 29-year-old mother, Debbie Ann Lowe, on parole for a drug conviction, was being held in Fresno County Jail on suspicion of murder in the deaths of her two children, Ebony Whitfield, 20 months, and Myisha Tolbert, 6 months.

Lowe was spotted Sunday afternoon “acting crazy” in a neighborhood several miles from her apartment, according to police. She emerged from an abandoned house in a seedy part of town screaming and wielding a large rock.

She then tried to break the window on a van belonging to Luis Rodriguez, who told police he had never seen the woman in the neighborhood before.

“She was screaming and acting crazy,” Rodriguez told the Fresno Bee. “She said she was looking for her little baby. I told her that her baby wasn’t in my van.”

He said she left but soon returned with police officers, who could not make sense of her statements that her children had been kidnapped.

Police suspect that Lowe was under the influence of drugs and may have concocted the kidnapping story as a way to explain the deaths.

“At this point, we don’t know if she returned to the apartment and found the children and was using the kidnapping story to explain how they died,” Davis said.

Lowe directed police to her home at the Dakota Woods apartment complex. Officers found the upper-level, two-bedroom apartment shut tight with the air-conditioning unit turned off. They surmise that the oldest child, Ebony, may have crawled under the bed in search of a cooler place and died there. The children showed no other signs of trauma.

“We’re talking about either hypothermia, dehydration or a combination of the two,” said a spokesman for the Fresno County coroner. “They were normal, healthy-looking kids. They didn’t appear to be malnourished, and there was no obvious trauma on them.”

Neighbors in the complex said they saw no outward signs of neglect or abuse. “She always had her kids with her,” said Connie Villegas, who lives in an apartment below Lowe. “When I was up there, the apartment was always clean. Her kids were always clean.”

The apartment manager said Lowe had moved in with one child in July 1996 and was receiving public assistance checks. This was a few months after she spent more than a year in prison on a drug conviction and was paroled, according to the state Department of Corrections.

Shortly after moving in, Lowe gave birth to a second child. The father of the child lived with Lowe for several months but recently moved after the couple had argued over Lowe’s periodic absences, according to authorities.

Lowe was arrested Sunday on two counts of murder and violation of parole. The Fresno County district attorney’s office is reviewing police reports before deciding on charges.