Nurse’s assistant sentenced for torturing two adopted children

A nurse’s assistant from Palmdale was sentenced Wednesday to seven years to life in prison for torturing two children she had adopted, prosecutors said.

In December, Ingrid Brewer, 53, pleaded no contest to two counts of torturing the 7-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy she had adopted after serving as their foster mother, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

On Jan. 20, 2013, the two children were found blocks from Brewer’s home after they ran away. They were bruised and beaten, huddled under a blanket without winter clothes in temperatures that had dipped below 20 degrees, officials said.

The children fled because they were “tired of being tied up and beaten,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Brian Hudson of the Special Victims Bureau said at the time.

The children told deputies that Brewer beat them with electrical cords and a hammer and locked them in their bedrooms when she went to work as a nurse’s assistant at UCLA Medical Center, Hudson said.

After Brewer’s arrest, investigators discovered a history of child abuse investigations involving Brewer going back to 2001, when callers to the county’s child abuse hotline twice reported that she was abusing her biological children. Social workers decided the allegations were without merit.

Before Brewer’s adoption of the two children was finalized, county files contained at least nine investigations of alleged abuse involving Brewer over the previous 12 years, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

Brewer will be eligible for parole after seven years but could spend up to life in prison.

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Times staff writers Garrett Therolf and Ann Simmons contributed to this report.