Mother to Stand Trial in Baby’s Heat Death

A La Habra woman must stand trial for murder in the death of her infant son, who died after she left him in a sweltering car for six hours with the windows up, a Municipal judge ruled Monday.

While her son suffered in the heat, Kimberly Sue Fudge and her boyfriend slept in an air-conditioned motel room in Claremont.

“Your client has this pattern of leaving the baby unattended,” Pomona Municipal Judge Jack Hunt told Fudge’s lawyer. He said Fudge, 29, must stand trial for second-degree murder.

Fudge remains in jail on $500,000 bail. She was ordered to appear in Pomona Superior Court on July 26 to enter a plea.

At the preliminary hearing, a police officer testified that Fudge confessed to leaving Cailan Cutillo in the 1991 Buick outside the motel from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Det. Lawrence Horowitz also testified that Fudge had told him she had left the child in the same car outside a La Habra Kmart hours earlier.

A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department drug expert testified that Fudge had a large amount of methamphetamine in her blood when the baby was found.

Fudge went to the Howard Johnson Hotel to see her boyfriend, with whom she had argued the night before, police said. She fell asleep in the motel room and awoke to discover the baby dead.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Najara, seeking to justify the murder charge, said Fudge’s actions at the Kmart demonstrated she deliberately left her child in the car when she “went into the hotel to seduce her fiance.”

“Some acts are so intentional they no longer fall into the realm of accidents,” Najara said.

Defense attorney David Goldstein argued that when Fudge left the child at about 7:30 a.m., the temperature was 64 to 70 degrees, and there was no risk to human life.

With Fudge visibly distraught, and her grandfather and her sister in the front row of the courtroom, Goldstein added, “The bottom line is a child died--a tragic accident--but that isn’t murder.”