I’m pretty sure the name Heather Jensen sounds a little familiar. She is a Colorado mom whose two sons died in November 2012 of hypothermia — extreme heat– after being left in their family car. Jensen’s 2- and 4-year-old sons died in November 2012 when she left them in her SUV with the motor running and the heater on while she had sex and smoked marijuana in another vehicle nearby. Well,fast forward to today, and Jensen is in court on charges of child abuse and criminally negligent homicide.
Jensen’s sons died after she had strapped them into car seats in the back of her SUV and drove to the Grand Mesa east of Grand Junction to meet a male friend. She told her live-in boyfriend that she was taking the kids to play in the snow, the police investigation showed.
In addition, just wait until you hear what prosecutors say she was DOING while her 2- and 4-year-old sons lay dying. The allegation is the 25-year-old, whose husband had died just two months prior, was having sex. It certainly puts a salacious spin on the already troubling tragedy.
Lewis laid out a timeline that had Jensen leaving her boys in her car for nearly 90 minutes. Tyler opened and closed the car door about half an hour after she first left them in the car. Jensen went back to her vehicle and gave Tyler her cellphone to play with before locking the kiddie locks and returning to her friend’s truck for more than half an hour. Tests done later on the vehicle showed the temperature could have reached 140 degrees.
“Ms. Jensen created the situation that caused her children to die,” prosecutor Danielle Lewis told the jury of 10 women and five men. “It was a tragedy, but it was an accident. It was not a crime,” said public defender Elsa Archambault.