Aurora mom gets 27 years for tots’ fire deaths

CENTENNIAL | Danielle Brockman’s life was a mess well before her children were killed Oct. 30, 2011.

That’s the day Brockman tucked her 3-year-old son and 15-month-old daughter into bed and left them alone so she could go party with friends. While she was out, the house caught fire, and the two children died.

The deaths of Timothy and Alivia Ramirez were tragic, but they were seemingly just another milestone in Brockman’s already tragic life. Both of her parents were crack addicts, and while her mom was in prison her dad died of a drug overdose. Her childhood was marked by instability and abuse. She bounced around between relatives, and when she was 8 her mom forced her to steal from a Walmart.

Still, as she stood before a judge Thursday morning, the 25-year-old made no excuses.

“I have nobody to blame but myself,” she said, choking back sobs and reading from a folded sheet of paper she pulled from her bright orange jail jumpsuit. “I can’t blame my mom, I can’t blame my background. I made that decision on my own accord.”

Brockman said she longed for the days she had with her kids, even the days when she was at her wit’s end and overwhlemed by motherhood.

“I took them for granted,” she said.

A judge later sentenced Brockman to 27 years in prison. She agreed in August to a sentence of between 24 and 28 years in prison in exchange for her pleading guilty to two counts of child abuse resulting in death. Had she gone to trial, she faced 48 years in prison.

Prosecutors and Brockman’s defense team both said it would have been understandable for Brockman to point to her brutal childhood as a reason for her negligence that night.

“Children should not be raised the way Ms. Brockman was raised,” Deputy District Attorney Emily Warren said.

Taking responsibility for her actions marked a substantial shift for Brockman, who for a time said in recorded jail phone calls that she didn’t deserve any prison time, that nobody could have known the house would catch fire that night and that her kids would die.

Warren said Brockman’s dramatic change of heart was the reason prosecutors were willing to shave two decades of her potential sentence. But, Warren said, she still left the children alone for more than seven hours while she went to a bar and a house party with friends. Even if the fire never happened, that’s a crime, she said.

“No reasonable person would leave those children alone in a house,” she said.

Brockman’s mother and aunt asked the judge to show mercy on Brockman, saying she was overwhelmed by life and wasn’t in her right state of mind when she left the children that night.

That testimony Thursday seemed to frustrate Brockman’s lawyer, public defender Jim O’Connor, who stressed to the judge that Brockman wasn’t deflecting responsibility, wasn’t pointing the finger at the system or anyone else’s failures. In her written statements to the court she was a harsher critic of her actions than O’Connor advised her to be, he said.

“She is sincerely, deeply —probably irreparably — sorrowful over not only what happened, but what she did to cause what happened,” O’Connor said.