Hamm and her boyfriend, Maurice LaGrone Jr., told police they had managed to escape as the muddy waters of Clinton Lake poured into the car.
Authorities found nothing wrong mechanically with her car and ended up charging both the mother and her boyfriend with first-degree murder in the children's deaths. LaGrone was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but a separate DeWitt County jury acquitted Hamm of their killings, convicting her instead of child endangerment.
Now Hamm, 39, finds herself back in court, this time in Cook County, fighting to regain custody of her new family. After completing five years in prison, she married another man, and they had three children together. The two met in a halfway house.
But after learning of her new family just last year, state child welfare officials took the two girls and a boy away from Hamm and her husband. The couple are now in the midst of a hearing in juvenile court to determine whether the kids were abused or neglected. They are fighting to regain custody of the three children who are close in age to the three kids who died.
As testimony got underway last week, the hearing was mostly a reprise of Hamm's 2006 murder trial as investigators, some long retired, recounted the horrific events of that day in September 2003.
Cook County prosecutors allege that Hamm, now named Amanda Ware, is making the same poor decisions that will likely put the lives of her children at risk.
"She has a pattern of choosing relationships that are abusive in different ways," Assistant State's Attorney Joan Pernecke said last week in court.
Allegations of abuse
According to testimony last week, she called 911 in April 2012 after, she said, her husband, Leo Ware, hit her with an open hand on her neck http://www.mnn.com/family by her right ear. Chicago police Officer William Smith testified that Amanda Ware was crying and upset and that he arrested her husband but saw no reason to call the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. No charges appear to have been filed over the incident, however.
In August 2013, Ware took out an order of protection against her husband, alleging he had stolen $100 from her, according to court records.
"Me and Leo have been together 5 years and married for 3 but he has been using crack and he has been steeling (sic) from me," she handwrote.
In her filing, she alleged that Ware had physically abused her in front of their children and that she feared for her family's safety, records show.
"He has been abusive in the past and I know what he is capable of doing to me," she wrote.
But she dropped the petition two weeks later, according to the records.
The public guardian's office, which is representing the interests of her three children, wants the judge to find that the parents abused and neglected them.
"There's enough similarities here that we definitely feel the state will be able to sustain its burden," Public Guardian Robert Harris said in an interview.
But supporters, including her former criminal defense attorney, have called the proceedings a punitive witch hunt over a tragic accident.
"It's a travesty," said Steven Skelton, an attorney in Bloomington. "For the life of me, I can't understand why Cook County is continuing to prosecute this."
Amanda Ware told her attorney she was sick, and she did not attend the hearing Thursday or Friday, but her husband noted that DCFS workers found nothing wrong with the living conditions in their Near North Side apartment when they removed the children from the home. He also said he is nothing like LaGrone, his wife's former boyfriend.
"The only thing we have in common is the color of our skin," Leo Ware, 49, told the Tribune outside juvenile court on Chicago's West Side. "This whole thing to me is racism."
His wife is white Ware and LaGrone are black.
Ware, who pointed out that even violent offenders are allowed to keep their children, did several prison stints in the 1980s and '90s for felony convictions for delivery of a controlled substance and theft as well as violations of probation, according to court records. He was most recently found guilty of misdemeanor battery in 2009 and was sentenced to time served a day in jail, the records show.
"Everyone has a background, has a history," he said. "They could take everybody's kids.
"They've destructed my whole life with this. What's so important about this case?"
'Mommy! Mommy!'
After working her shift as a waitress Sept. 2, 2003, the then-Amanda Hamm went out to dinner in downstate Clinton with LaGrone and her three children. Afterward the family drove in their dark green 1997 Oldsmobile Cutlass to Clinton Lake, a popular 4,900-acre fishing spot. LaGrone drove the car down a grooved concrete boat ramp and parked near the water line. Everyone got out to play.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W-eitpMRw
The couple had been fighting in the weeks leading up to that night, according to testimony from investigators in juvenile court.
LaGrone had moved in with Hamm the day after the two met. Investigators allege he resented Hamm's children from different fathers sons Christopher Hamm, 6, and Austin Brown, 3, and daughter Kyleigh Hamm, almost 2.
He abused her physically and verbally, once raping her during an argument over her alleged infidelity, Hamm told investigators after the drownings. LaGrone also threatened Christopher, once pressing a screwdriver to his throat so tightly it left a mark, a former detective testified. And on the day before the drownings, he wielded a knife and threatened to cut the boy, the detective said.
Before the children's deaths, a woman with whom LaGrone was involved came to their home, sparking an argument.
"It started a whole ball of fire," Hamm told Richard Hawn, then a DeWitt County sheriff's police detective, in a recorded interview.
Hamm had been accepted to a college in St. Louis, LaGrone's hometown, but there was housing available for only two, according to Pernecke, the prosecutor.
Not long before the drownings, the couple went alone to a hotel pool to swim laps, according to testimony.
Pernecke told Judge Demetrios Kottaras that was "practice" for what would happen at Clinton Lake.
On Sept. 2, when it came time to leave, everyone piled into the car. Hamm told investigators the car quickly moved forward into the lake, the water hitting the windshield and then rapidly filling the car.
Hamm said she turned to try and unbuckle Kyleigh from her child seat but couldn't, testified Hawn, now retired. She then panicked and left the car on the driver's side, swimming to shore, where she joined LaGrone, who had quickly escaped.
"She said she looked back at the car and saw her children's faces looking out the back window of the car," testified Hawn, showing how Hamm had stretched her neck and raised her head to mimic her kids' movements.
The water was illuminated by the car's taillights.
"They were yelling, 'Mommy! Mommy!'" said Hawn, making an effort to keep his composure. "She did not return to the water."
Instead, Hamm called 911 from a nearby pay phone, according to Hawn.
Tiny handprints
The first officer on the scene, former Patrol Deputy Timothy Collins, testified that he saw Hamm and LaGrone standing by the pay phone.
On learning the three children were still in the car, the 5-foot-3 Collins said he entered the chest-high water and easily opened the rear passenger door.
He held his breath and felt along the back seats and floorboards but couldn't find the children. Other first responders soon found their lifeless bodies floating near the ceiling, Collins testified.
Collins later watched as air trapped inside the car was pushed to the back window, fogging it up.
It was then that he noticed images on the glass.
"There were a lot of tiny handprints," Collins said. "Fifteen to 20 of them."
Both Collins and Hawn testified that Hamm showed no emotion at the hospital after learning her children had died. She began to cry only after seeing her mother collapse to the floor weeping, Collins said.
Investigators conducted tests and determined the car could not have accidentally rolled into the lake. Each time they were able to back the car up the ramp.
After her release from prison, Hamm met Ware at Ashunti House, a drug addiction treatment facility on Chicago's West Side, according to Ware.
Last year she was in Presence St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago's Lakeview East neighborhood giving birth to their third child when a doctor on staff recognized her. The physician called DCFS, which took custody of the children, placing them with a paternal aunt on the South Side, according to Ware.
The custody battle over the three children, now ages 5, 3 and 1 1/2, is scheduled to resume Thursday. Judge Kottaras will decide whether prosecutors have proved that abuse and neglect is more likely than not to have occurred. If the judge finds in the prosecutors' favor, he will decide, after a further hearing, whether the children should become wards of the court and who should care for them. The final step would then be for him to decide whether the Wares are unfit parents and if it is in the best interests of their children that they lose their parental rights.
For Hawn, the http://bestvideobabymonitor.co.uk/shop/ sight of toys, diapers and, in particular, a child's St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap that fell from the car as it was towed out of the lake has stuck with him.
"My son had one exactly like it that summer," he said.
The cap was placed in Christopher's coffin before it was lowered into the ground, Hawn testified.
sschmadeke@tribpub.com
Twitter @SteveSchmadeke
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