Timothy Joseph Ramirez                     Alivia Rainn Ramirez

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The little brother and sister were asleep as fire and smoke crept through their house, asphyxiating them in their beds. No one was home to protect them. Timothy and Alivia’s mother Danielle Brockman, had put them to bed and at 9:30 p.m. went out to party with her friends. She returned home at 5 a.m. after a night of drinking and smoking marijuana. Several witnesses called 911 to report the smoke from the home. Brockman stood outside the burning home as she saw the house smoke when she got out of a cab about a block away. It took three police officers to pry iron security bars off the children’s bedroom window. By the time they reached the kids, it was too late.

 

Alivia was hospitalized after firefighters retrieved her from the fire. Her brother Timothy died en route to the hospital. Police arrested the children's mother, Danielle Brockman, on suspicion of two counts of child abuse resulting in death. Michael Ramirez made it from Georgia to his daughter Alivia's bedside at Children's Hospital in Aurora as she lay in his arms when she passed away.

 

The fire was not the first time Arapahoe County authorities had heard of little Timothy and Alivia Ramirez. Three times in the previous three years, people had called child protective services to report concerns. On July 4, four months before the fire, Timothy was wandering alone on 13th Avenue in Aurora. His mother, who showed up 10 minutes after police, said she had trouble keeping him from escaping. The referral was “screened out.”Then, just weeks before the children’s deaths, Aurora police informed child protection workers that a neighbor found Timothy wandering alone outside at midnight. Contacted by a police officer, Brockman “seemed unconcerned.” That referral was accepted for investigation by a caseworker, who advised Brockman and her father about how to improve parenting skills.

 

It took police two weeks to pass along information about the boy alone outside at midnight. Also, the caseworker working with the family had not yet contacted the children’s father, who lived in Atlanta. He might have told the caseworkers as he did after the fire that Brockman would disappear for weeks at a time and was “more concerned with her friends and partying than being a responsible mother.”

 

Brockman was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

 

 

 

 

 

http://childfatalities.denverpost.com/#id=48&name=RamirezAlivia