‘Where’s My Mom?’

It can seem almost comic, the heat that torments this San Joaquin Valley town every August. Day after day temperatures climb above 100 degrees. Parked cars become barbecue kettles. Social evenings end with guests huddled under the swamp cooler, panting.

Fresno, of course, has made its accommodations. A million air conditioners thrum through the summer afternoons. Sprinklers chirp all night, restoring the fried Bermuda grass. Kids go native, wearing nothing but cutoff shorts for weeks at a time. The people who live here learn to tolerate the heat, to plan around it, even to laugh about it.

They amuse themselves with horror stories about melted steering wheels and pool water that’s too hot for swimming. This week, in the aftermath of a typical run of 100-degree days, Fresno has been telling itself another hot weather story. This one has no comic value. This one is not typical at all:

A mother closes an apartment door behind her. This is last Thursday, a day when the temperature will hit 106. She had shut the windows, turned off the air conditioner. She leaves behind a tidy household, everything in place. She also leaves behind her two babies--a 20-month-old toddler, an 8-month-old infant. And after she is gone--on a drug binge, law enforcement officials allege--the heat sets to work on her children.

*

Nobody can say for certain what happened inside Apartment 219E after Debbie Ann Lowe, a 29-year-old with a history of narcotics trouble, disappeared into “the hottest day of the year.” Four days later she would turn up miles from the Dakota Woods apartment complex, telling incoherent stories about the theft of her babies.

Sometime during the mother’s absence, an apartment security guard heard children crying in 219E. He did not investigate. Police officers arrived at the apartment late Sunday afternoon. “I started to go in with them,” said Rosita Smith, a neighbor and cousin of Lowe. “I only got halfway down the hall when they started pushing me back.” In a crib, face up, was 8-month-old Myisha. On the floor, halfway hidden beneath a bed, was 20-month-old Ebony. Both were dead.

Coroner’s investigators determined the infant had died first, perhaps in the second day of her mother’s absence. Her crib was pushed against a window. The blinds were half-open. A medical examiner said he did not want to guess how hot it must have been under that window, as the temperature outside hit 106 degrees. He described the skin of Myisha as “parched, cooked.”

Ebony, he said, apparently had been “running around” until she dropped from dehydration. Her blanket was found in one room, her body in another. At the foot of Myisha’s crib, investigators discovered a loaf of bread. It was the only food in the house not put away in a cupboard or refrigerator. They figured that Ebony had managed to drag it off the counter. The toddler, however, could not twist open the plastic package.

Whether she intended to feed herself or her little sister will not be known.

*

Smith, the mother’s cousin, said Ebony would not have been able to open the apartment door for help. “She was only this high,” the woman said, placing a hand above her knee. She spoke now with her eyes almost closed: “Can you imagine. You are a child left in the house, and you don’t know why. She must have been devastated. Every morning she wakes up and it’s, ‘Where’s my mom?’ ” In a childlike voice, Smith repeated the question three times.

Prosecutors late Tuesday announced that they would file murder charges against Lowe. At this point, investigators have not determined whether the deaths were the product of gross neglect or planned vengeance. One theory in play is that Lowe acted in anger against her absent boyfriend, the father of the 8-month-old.

“I know she wouldn’t do that to her children,” said Smith, at the moment the lone voice of support for Lowe in this town. “She wouldn’t let that happen. Something went wrong somewhere.”

Yes, something did. And now, as an unwed welfare mother on parole for drug-related crimes, Lowe will serve the agenda of too many causes to count. Already the airwaves rattle with talk of tying tubes and death by desert banishment, while health officials seize the moment to explain the perils of extreme heat.

Somehow, none of the talk matches the horror of two babies slowly cooking to death. The heat wave, incidentally, broke here just about the time the little bodies were discovered. On Tuesday a cooling breeze blew through a parched cherry tree just below Lowe’s second-story apartment--too late to do any good.