The pain Yvonne Mabry feels about leaving granddaughter Elizabeth Buchmiller in a car on a July day when the temperature reached 97 degrees is almost unbearable, she says.
In a letter to Denver District Judge Robert McGahey, Mabry, 36, who avoided prison time by pleading guilty Thursday to criminally negligent child abuse resulting in death, explained her remorse over the 2-year-old’s death from heat exposure.
“I am haunted every day by the horror I put Elizabeth through that afternoon,” she said. “The image of her screaming my name, needing me to come save her, terrifies me. I will do everything in my power for the rest of my life to help my family heal from this loss.”
Mabry told investigators that on the day Elizabeth died, she drank “several beers and some hard liquor” while in charge of Elizabeth and her 5-year-old sister.
Under Thursday’s plea bargain, Mabry will be sentenced to five years of intensive supervised probation with no early termination. She can drink no alcohol or supervise children younger than 10. She’ll be sentenced May 4. She originally was charged with the more serious count of child abuse resulting in death.
According to investigators, Mabry said she returned from a liquor store and she and the children were tired. Mabry said she thought she must have put Elizabeth in the car but didn’t remember doing so.
A neighbor found the child near Mabry’s home in the Jody Apartments, 5375 W. 10th Ave.
Elizabeth was in the back seat of the car with its windows rolled up in the parking lot.
Mabry said in the letter that she made a “horrible decision.”
“Her parents and her sister relied on me to take good care of both girls, and I let them all down. I let down the whole world by allowing Liz’s bright light to extinguish,” she said.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
