A California woman called for stricter drunk driving laws after two of her children were killed by a drunk driver. She has been charged with manslaughter after authorities found her drunk and unconscious in an SUV with her daughter’s body. Her daughter died while locked in their car in temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Relatives found the 3-year-old girl and her mother, Sandra Hernandez-Cazares, 42, Friday afternoon in the mother’s Ford Expedition, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office reported Tuesday.
The vehicle was parked in front of Hernandez-Cazares’ apartment in Anaheim, southeast of Los Angeles. The temperature at the time was about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the prosecutor’s office said.
Court documents show Hernandez-Cazares was charged with involuntary manslaughter, child abuse and child endangerment and one count of causing serious bodily injury to a child under 5.
She is being held on $150,000 bail and faces a maximum sentence of 12 years in prison, according to prosecutors.
The Orange County District Attorney’s Office, which represents Hernandez-Cazares, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the district attorney’s press release, Hernandez-Cazares’ family members discovered her SUV after staff members at her 5-year-old son’s school told them no one had picked up the boy.
The family members broke the window of the Expedition and found Hernandez-Cazares unconscious, the prosecution said. It later turned out that she had four times the legal limit of alcohol in her blood, the prosecution said.
The toddler was pronounced dead after attempts to revive her failed, the prosecutor’s office said. Medical officials believe the girl had been dead for several hours, prosecutors said.
Two of Hernandez-Cazares’ sons, ages 5 and 9, died in 2012 during a family vacation at a North Dakota campground after a drunk driver ran over their tent, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office said in an email. She later lobbied the state legislature for tougher penalties, the news release said.
“The unimaginable pain of having your 5-year-old and 9-year-old sons killed by a drunk driver is something you can never recover from,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in the release.
“Anyone who has experienced such a devastating tragedy knows that the ripple effects of grief can be hidden, but the pain of losing your children never goes away,” Spitzer said, according to the press release. “A mother who was robbed of the chance to see two of her sons grow up because of the selfish decision of a stranger will have to live with the fact that she will never see her little girl grow up because of the choices she made.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
