A Texas mother whose two young children died in a hot car while she partied inside a shed has been sentenced to 40 years in prison, the Washington Post reports. Police say that on June 7, 2017, Amanda Hawkins, then 19, drove her 1- and 2-year-old daughters to the hospital. The girls were in dire condition and their mother claimed they’d collapsed after smelling flowers at a nearby lake. Police quickly determined that flowers weren’t the culprit. Instead, the girls’ mother intentionally left them in her car overnight while she partied with friends, according to Hill Country Breaking News. The children — Brynn Hawkins, 1, and Addyson Overgard-Eddy, 2 — were trapped in the car for 15 to 18 hours as temperatures reached close to 90 degrees. That evening, someone heard the girls crying in the car and asked Hawkins to bring them inside. “She said: ‘No, it’s fine. They’ll cry themselves to sleep.’”
Prosecutors said that Hawkins woke up around noon the next day and had sex before going out and finding the girls, Hill Country Breaking News reported. Hawkins pleaded guilty in September to two felony counts of abandoning or endangering a child causing imminent danger or death, bodily injury or physical or mental impairment, and two counts of injury to a child. Police said Hawkins was initially reluctant to drive the children to the hospital because “she did not want to get in trouble.” For an extensive report on deaths of children in hot cars, see also TCR’s special report on Memory’s Surprising Role in Child Car Deaths.