Mother who killed her two children by locking them in a hot car to "teach them a lesson" gets 40-year sentence
Texas mother Cynthia Marie Randolph, 25, was facing charges after she locked her two toddlers in the car on a hot summer day leading to their deaths. The children were found dead on 26 May, 2017. She has now been jailed for 40 years.
Cynthia Marie Randolph locked her two-year-old daughter Juliet Ramirez and one-year brother Cavanaugh Ramirez in the car to teach “ a lesson” after they refused to get out of the car in 200 block of Rambling Loop, west of Lake Weatherford, Texas. On that day, the temperature had reached over 36ºC.
Randolph of Weatherford, Texas, was handed two 20-year prison terms – the sentences to run concurrently. The same jury convicted her of two second-degree felony counts of recklessly causing injury to a child hours earlier, says a report in The Sun.
Randolph reportedly made multiple stories regarding her act. The sheriff’s office said, “Throughout multiple interviews, she 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 when they “took off” and got themselves locked inside of the car. She also said she tried breaking the window to save them.
Later, Randolph confessed that she found the two children playing in the car midday and she tried getting them out but they refused to so she locked the doors, admonishing her kids saying “Juliet could get herself and her brother out of car when ready”.
Randolph later went inside the house and smoked a marijuana joint, watched Keeping up with the Kardashians and then slept for two-three hours. She admitted that she broke the windows to make it seem like an accident.
It is reported that Randolph also claimed the children had been in the car for an hour at max but homicide reports showed that they were likely locked in for several hours. Temperatures inside the car could have reached 60C.
According to No Heat Stroke, 744 children have died due to pediatric vehicular heatstroke since 1998. All of these deaths could have been prevented.