Mother charged for daughter’s hot car death acquitted

A young El Paso mother on trial for allegedly leaving her child in a car overnight and finding the girl dead the next day is suddenly off the hook.

A lot of ABC-7 viewers are expressing strong emotions over Daisy Mora Harper’s acquittal. ABC-7 spoke with Harper’s defense attorney Friday and he said Judge Marcos Lizarraga had no choice but to grant a directed verdict of an acquittal after the prosecution failed to prove a time of death for her daughter Hailey.

Harper was originally charged with Criminal Negligent Homicide and Injury to a Child by Omission.

“They didn’t specify a time, they didn’t pin it down,” said Harper’s defense attorney Rafael Morales, who admitted his client was drunk in the early morning of July 6, 2014, woke up at 8 am, then went back to sleep.

Harper’s brother, Jerry, took her son out of the car, but did not remove her daughter Hailey, who wasn’t discovered until after Noon the next day – dead of heat exposure.

“We know that the baby was left in the car about 2:30 or 2:45 a.m.,” Morales said. “So what they wanted to do was, at 8 am when she wakes up the next day, that’s when they wanted to say, that’s when her criminal culpability kind of started.”

Morales said the prosecution’s case was doomed when it failed to get the medical examiner to specify a time of death.

In his motion for a directed verdict, Judge Marcos Lizarraga states: “If two-year-old Hailey died before 8 a.m., then under the stated theory it would be a legal and factual impossibility for daisy Mora Harper to have committed the negligent homicide crime that was charged against her.”

“It was a very interesting decision by the state of Texas not to even call the brother, to pretend as if his conduct didn’t even exist,” Morales said. “They made it seem like the brother wasn’t there. In fact, in its opening, the State of Texas didn’t even mention the brother by name.”

District Attorney Jaime Esparza gave ABC-7 this statement: “We objected to the judge’s ruling. We believe there was enough evidence for a jury to decide. Unfortunately, his ruling cannot be appealed.”

“We’re all suffering because of this,” Morales said, “nowhere near as much as the Harpers and the Mora’s are, but that doesn’t mean that there was a crime that took place here.”

The District Attorney’s office confirmed that assistant district attorneys Bill Anderson and Patricia Borschow, some of their most experienced attorneys, prosecuted this case.