Arrest of Dead Children’s Mother Sparks Outrage

Whatever grief Jackie Robles may be feeling from the death of her two young daughters, struck by a commuter train, remained locked away with her as she sat in a San Bernardino County Jail cell Wednesday.

But public passion over the tragedy, which occurred after her two toddlers wandered half a block from their home, was more evident and directed at the police who arrested her.

Authorities remained silent on the specific reasons why they arrested Robles, but acknowledge being pummeled by public outrage.

“We’ve received a lot of phone calls, and they’ve been everything but supportive,” said Upland Police Capt. Walter Ciszek. “I’ve been called a lot of names today. . . . Any time we make an arrest, we get calls, but I don’t recall where it was ever this sensitive.”

“I tell them . . . a judge and a jury will have the final decision on whether we were right or not,” he said.

Robles would be arraigned today if San Bernardino County prosecutors decide to file formal charges against her, and it’s a quandary that is painfully familiar to them.

“You draw the line [between prosecution and pity] by looking at all the surrounding circumstances,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Denise Trager, who did not know the specifics of the Robles case but, because she has prosecuted parents whose children were killed in accidents, could speak in general terms.

Just hours after the deaths of 3-year-old Alexes Robles and 22-month-old Deziree Soto, Robles was arrested on suspicion of felony child endangerment--or, in the language of the law, “willful cruelty to children causing injury or death.” She remained in jail in lieu of $50,000 bail. The father of her two younger children was already in jail for beating Robles.

The two girls slipped out of the house after Robles fell asleep, exhausted after being up much of the previous night with her sick 2-month-old son, said Robles’ mother, Rosemary Robles. She had recently moved in with her daughter’s family but had already left that morning to go to work.

“She told me, ‘Mom, I changed the kids, they were eating cereal, watching Barney on TV and I fell asleep,’ ” the grandmother said.

“She woke up, called for Alexes, didn’t find her anywhere and went outside,” she said.

By then, the girls had walked outside through a door that, according to the grandmother, was normally locked but easily opened. They walked down the stairs of their second-floor apartment and trekked hand-in-hand down the block, to where it dead-ends at the railroad tracks.

“I’m not angry with the police, but I would like Jackie to be with us,” the elder Robles said. “Her babies have been taken from her, and she’s grieving alone.”

She said the family had no contact with authorities about child safety issues prior to her daughter’s arrest Tuesday.

“My daughter’s not some vicious child abuse mother,” she said. “She’s a very good, loving mother.”

Jackie Robles is represented by attorney Chaim Magnum, who met his client Wednesday night and later described her as still in shock.

After meeting with her, he said, he concluded that “it sounds truly like an accident. But I guess the police felt somebody has to answer for it.”

Police tested Robles for use of alcohol and drugs, but she said she didn’t use them and the tests should prove negative, Magnum said.

Mourning family members visited the death site on Wednesday--wailing at small shrines of stuffed toys, a cross, flowers and poems alongside the Metrolink tracks where the two half sisters were struck.

Jose Ramirez, Robles’ grandfather, was rigid with anger. “It’s not right that they arrested her, because she’s a good person,” he said. “She takes good care of her children. We all have a careless moment in life.”

While that may be so, the district attorney has questions that now need to be answered, Trager said.

Neighbors will be asked whether the children were regularly supervised. Was there evidence of drug or alcohol abuse in the home? Had there been a history of intervention by Child Protective Services? What precautions were taken to keep the children from going outside? How long were the children missing? How far had the children traveled? And did the mother miss the children, or not know they had encountered trouble until after it was too late?

“If it’s truly a mother who’s overworked, has three kids, is fatigued, and this is an accident, it won’t rise to the level of criminal culpability,” Trager said.

“But the police at the scene, as much as they can . . . determine if a crime had occurred,” Trager said. “If they have probable cause to believe so, they are obligated to arrest the person. . . . Without second-guessing them, it’s very likely there may have been something else here than just falling asleep.”

With Robles’ arrest, her 2-month-old son was placed with the San Bernardino County office of Child Protective Services.

Fernando Soto, 25--the father of the two younger children--is also in jail for having assaulted Robles Aug. 3. Soto, a former Marine combat veteran from Desert Storm who more recently worked at an auto body shop, pleaded guilty Oct. 3 to felony spousal abuse and is awaiting formal sentencing of a year in jail, according to his attorney, Douglas E. McCann.

At the time Soto struck his wife, she was pregnant with their youngest child. Robles is now deaf in one ear, allegedly from that incident, according to McCann.

McCann, who said he is working to win Soto’s temporary release from jail so he can attend the girls’ funerals, said there was no evidence at the time of that assault that the home life was saddled with a drug or alcohol abuse problem.

He said that on behalf of the parents, he may sue various public agencies, including Metrolink, for not having placed a fence along the railroad tracks, which he compared to an attractive nuisance.

Metrolink announced Wednesday that it would install a mile-long section of fence along the tracks that border the working-class neighborhood. The request came from Upland Mayor Robert Nolan, who serves on the Southern California Regional Rail Authority board, which operates Metrolink.

But in a prepared statement, Metrolink officials said: “No amount of public education could have prevented this incident, since toddlers could have wandered onto a busy street with the same result.”

Some people say the fence, which Metrolink promised to install as quickly as possible, is too late.

“After my granddaughter gets killed, then they decided to do something,” Dalia Solis, grandmother of the older girl, complained bitterly Wednesday.

Many neighbors continued to rally to Robles’ defense, saying she normally watches her children like a hawk.

“They make her out like this monster, that she was such a bad mother to let this happen,” said Bryan Montgomery, who shares an apartment courtyard with Robles. “It could have been prevented. It happened. But she was a caring mother.”

Some other neighbors were less sympathetic toward Robles, however.

“She’s got her close friends who have every excuse in the book, and then you have everybody else [around here] who’s ready to condemn her,” said neighbor Roger Daly, who had seen the unattended toddlers walking down the sidewalk toward the railroad tracks, but didn’t know who they were and assumed they were heading home.

“There’s no way on God’s green earth they should have been allowed out there,” he said. “I wish I had known they were going to keep on going [toward the tracks]. If I had known, I would have turned into Superman and stopped that train.”

The tragedy notwithstanding, prosecutors will now carefully consider the circumstances leading to the girls’ deaths before deciding to pursue the case, Trager said.

She recalled two separate incidents in which children drowned in bathtubs. In one case, “it was a terrible tragedy” and no charges were filed, but in the other--after evidence surfaced that the mother was on the telephone for a lengthy time, leaving the child unattended in the tub even as the water continued to flow, the case was pursued. That mother pleaded guilty.

Trager recalled another case in which a 2-year-old child without diapers had wandered into the middle of a street, causing motorists to swerve, unbeknownst to the baby-sitter.

“We didn’t file on that case,” Trager said. “There was insufficient evidence to show that she had knowledge the child had gotten outside.”

The maximum sentence for child endangerment is six years in state prison. More typically, Trager said, a parent who has lost a child, but without evidence of gross negligence, faces five years’ probation and a maximum of one year in local jail.

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Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this story.