Woman Sentenced for Leaving Children in Trunk

By Brian Bergstein for The Associated Press
Originally published by The Associated Press, July 31, 2001

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A woman who repeatedly left her young children in the trunk of her car while she was at work—and once turned up the radio to drown out one boy's cries—was sentenced to three months in jail and five months of home detention Tuesday.

A tearful Rosemarie Radovan, 31, also was sentenced to five years of probation. She pleaded no contest in March to two counts of felony child endangerment.

"I know what I did was wrong," Radovan said, breaking down in tears. "I'm sorry about that. I love my children so much."

The single mother said she has been in counseling and working on her parenting skills in hopes of someday being reunited with her sons, who have been living with her parents.

Radovan was arrested in November after a co-worker told police he heard her 5-year-old son crying while he and Radovan drove to get ice cream. Radovan turned up the car's radio and kept driving—a fact that Judge Robert Ambrose said he found "particularly offensive."

Investigators determined that Radovan had left the boy and her other son, then 7, in the trunk as many as 10 times in a year while she worked at an electronics-manufacturing company in Santa Clara. On some occasions, the car's back seat was lowered so the boys could crawl from the trunk into the passenger section, prosecutor Dan Nishigaya said. The children were never physically harmed, he said.