Texas mother faces charges after two toddlers die in hot car
She told authorities she locked children in car to teach daughter ‘a lesson’
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Your support makes all the difference.A Texas woman is facing charges after her two children died as a result of being locked in a hot car.
Cynthia Marie Randolph admitted that she locked her children in the car last month to teach her two-year-old daughter Juliet “a lesson” after the child had refused to get out of the vehicle.
Juliet Ramirez and her brother, 16-month-old Cavanaugh Ramirez, were pronounced dead at 16.30 on 26 May.
Temperatures at the time were about 35.5C, according to police.
The children had been locked inside the car outside Randolph’s home near Lake Weatherford in Parker County.
The sheriff’s office said “throughout multiple interviews, Randolph created several variations of the events which led to the death of her children”.
Randolph originally said the children were playing in the back room of the house and "took off". She said they climbed into the car by themselves and locked it from the inside.
She also said she had broken the window to save them.
Later, the 24-year-old confessed that she had found the children playing in the car just after midday, and they refused to leave, so she locked the doors, thinking “she could get herself and her brother out of car when ready”.
Randolph went inside her house and smoked marijuana. She then fell asleep for between two and three hours.
She admitted she broke the car window to make the deaths look like an accident.
Randolph faces two felony charges of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury.
According to a campaign called No Heat Stroke, there have been 714 cases of children dying after they were left in hot cars since 1998, and 14 children have died so far this year alone.
The same database found that 17 per cent of these cases were due to the children being deliberately left inside a vehicle by an adult on a hot day.
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