Mum jailed for 40 years after children left to die in hot car

A Texas mum whose two toddlers died after she left them inside a hot vehicle overnight has been sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Amanda Hawkins, 20, learned her punishment on Wednesday for the June 2017 deaths of her two daughters in Kerrville, about 100 kilometres northwest of San Antonio.

Hawkins pleaded guilty in September to two counts of child abandonment and endangerment, and two counts of injury to a child. She received two 20-year sentences for each daughter’s case, which she’s ordered to serve consecutively.

Hawkins left one-year-old Brynn Hawkins and two-year-old Addyson Overgard-Eddy inside her vehicle while she visited friends at a Kerrville home on June 6, 2017, according to police reports. It stated she was smoking marijuana with friends in a shed outside the home that night.

Witnesses reported hearing the toddlers crying inside the car, where temperatures reached into the high 20s.

Hawkins retrieved the girls from the car the following afternoon when the temperature inside the car was estimated to have been 48C, according to a vehicle interior temperature scale.

She bathed the children and searched on the internet how to treat heat stroke before taking the toddlers to the hospital, prosecutors said.

The girls were pronounced dead at a San Antonio hospital two days later.

“The most compelling piece of evidence was the slow and painful deaths these children endured — with cramps, headaches, seizures, anxiety and wondering ‘where’s mummy,'” Kerr County Judge N. Keith Williams said.

Hawkins apologised for her actions before Williams issued his sentencing decision.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I think about what I should have done,” Hawkins said.

“It’s heartbreaking, and it will affect me for the rest of my life.”