Mothers

Edith Moreno was only 12 years old, but last week the Sun Valley girl had a serious question for her friend and next-door neighbor Karina Valdez. What happens when we die? Karina and her parents are Jehovah's Witnesses. Taking her Bible, 12-year-old Karina explained that death was like going to sleep and waiting to be resurrected by God. "I didn't really think anything about it because we were teaching her about our other beliefs," said Karina's mother, Irene Bell. "Edith was just a wonderful, happy child.

The mother of an 18-month-old girl found dead near a San Fernando Valley freeway has recanted her story about the toddler being abducted during an attack and now says she panicked after her daughter died in an accident and dumped the body herself, a sheriff's official said Thursday. Stacy Barker initially told detectives that she was knocked unconscious by an attacker at a Lancaster park as she was buckling her daughter, Emma Leigh Barker, into her car seat.

An Anaheim woman was charged with murder Wednesday in the drowning death of her 13-month-old son after toxicology tests confirmed she had been drunk at the time. Paige Elizabeth Looney also was charged with two counts of child abuse and endangerment with a sentencing enhancement for death due to child neglect. She faces a maximum sentence of 25 years to life if convicted. Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty.

It's over between Roberta and me. At least for now. What with her constant travels, her series of handlers and the 3,000-mile separation (she's in D.C., I'm in L.A.), it just wasn't working. I concede, with only a tinge of embarrassment, that I've been captivated by that world traveler, grandmother, freeway speedster and potential First Mother of the United States, Roberta McCain.

As prosecutors tell it, Eva Daley was far from your average mom when she pulled her Chevy Tahoe up to a Long Beach alley last year and let her son and his teenage friends pile out. Within minutes, the group had beaten and fatally stabbed a 13-year-old boy at a nearby park before rushing back to Daley's SUV, where she loaded them in and helped them escape, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday. As Daley's murder trial began in a downtown Long Beach courtroom, Deputy Dist. Atty.

A Long Beach mother accused of helping organize a gang-related attack by driving her teenage son and his friends to and from the scene of a fatal stabbing was found guilty Monday of second-degree murder. Eva Daley, 31, faces 15 years to life in prison for the killing of 13-year-old Jose Cano, who was assaulted last year by alleged gang members at a park just north of downtown Long Beach.

Nearly 40 years after her 3-year-old daughter went missing, a former Huntington Beach woman -- her gray hair pulled back in a ponytail -- listened as a prosecutor told jurors Monday that the 61-year-old mother spent decades covering up her daughter's murder, even as the child's father and brother searched futilely for answers.

It probably wasn't chance that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's first public event after announcing her interest in running for president -- a stop at a New York health center named for the Chelsea and Clinton neighborhoods -- echoed the name of her daughter. Nor was it chance that the new speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, took up her gavel for the first time earlier this year surrounded by children, including some of her grandchildren.

A woman convicted of letting her three children drown in a car that sank in a lake was sentenced in Clinton to 10 years in prison. Amanda Hamm, 30, was convicted in December in the deaths of Christopher Hamm, 6; Austin Brown, 3; and Kyleigh Hamm, 1, who were trapped in the car in Clinton Lake in 2003. She was cleared of first-degree murder charges that would have sent her to prison for life. Prosecutors allege Hamm and then-boyfriend Maurice LaGrone Jr.

When her children were young, Jenny Lauck used to flip on "Today" or "Good Morning America" as she brewed her morning coffee and tended to her babies. But several years ago, the 34-year-old mother of three stopped watching the morning shows. After getting TiVo, she had no patience to sit through multiple commercial breaks during a live newscast. On top of that, the segments began to seem more and more frivolous.