California officials say mom who pushed for DUI laws was drunk, unconscious with dead toddler inside SUV

A California mother who advocated for stricter DUI laws after two of her children were killed by a drunk driver has been charged with manslaughter after officials say they found her intoxicated and unconscious in an SUV with the body of her young daughter, who died locked inside their vehicle after temperatures topped 100 degrees.

Relatives discovered the 3-year-old girl and her mother, Sandra Hernandez-Cazares, 42, inside the mom’s Ford Expedition on Friday afternoon, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said Tuesday.

At the time, temperatures were roughly 104 degrees and the vehicle was parked outside Hernandez-Cazares’ apartment in Anaheim, southeast of Los Angeles, the prosecutor’s office said.

Hernandez-Cazares was charged with involuntary manslaughter, felony child abuse and endangerment and one count of causing great bodily injury on a child under 5 years old, court records show.

She is being held in lieu of $150,000 bail and faces a maximum sentence of 12 years in prison, according to the DA’s office.

The Orange County Public Defender’s Office, which is representing Hernandez-Cazares, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hernandez-Cazares’ relatives discovered her SUV after staff from her 5-year-old son’s school told them that no one had picked up the boy, according to the DA’s news release.   

The family members broke the Expedition’s window and found Hernandez-Cazares passed out, the DA’s office said. She was later found to have a blood alcohol level four times the legal limit, the prosecutor’s office said.

The toddler was pronounced dead after efforts to resuscitate her failed, the prosecutor’s office said. Medical officials believe the girl had been dead for several hours, according to prosecutors.

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 prosecutor’s office said in an email. She later lobbied the state legislature for stricter penalties, the release says.

“The unimaginable pain of having your 5-year-old and 9-year-old sons killed by a drunk driver is something from which you can never recover,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in the release.