Mum confesses role in toddlers’ car death

It was only after her nap that mother found her children unresponsive

On the day her two children were found dead, Cynthia Marie Randolph recounted for investigators a mother’s nightmare: She had been folding laundry and watching television while her young daughter and son, ages 2 and 16 months, played in an enclosed sun room on the back porch.

Randolph, 24, went to check on her children after about a half-hour — but they were “gone,” she told police. She said that after a half-hour of searching, she finally spotted their bodies, unresponsive, inside her 2010 Honda Crosstour parked in her driveway.

It was May 26, a day when the high temperature outside Randolph’s home in Weatherford, Texas, reached 96 degrees, according to police records.

Medics pronounced both children dead at the scene, authorities said.

According to the Parker County Sheriff’s Office, when asked how long the children might have been exposed to the high temperatures inside the car, Randolph responded immediately: “No more than an hour.”

Less than a month after the tragedy, Randolph has been arrested after her original explanation for her children’s deaths unravelled. Through multiple interviews with investigators over the past month, Randolph “created several variations of the events” of May 26, police said.

On Friday, Randolph described an entirely different timeline for what happened that day — one that began much earlier in the afternoon than she had previously admitted. At about 12.15pm, Randolph said she had found her children playing inside her car and ordered them to come out, police said.

“Stop your [expletive],” Randolph said she told her 2-year-old daughter, according to police. “When they refused to exit, Randolph told police she shut the car door to teach Juliet a lesson, thinking she could get herself and her brother out of the car when ready,” a probable cause affidavit for the incident stated. “The defendant went inside the house, smoked marijuana and took a nap. The defendant said she was asleep for two or three hours.”

It was only after her nap that Randolph found her children unresponsive inside the Honda Crosstour, police said. Randolph was charged on Friday with two first-degree felony counts of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury.