The mother who was to appear in court Wednesday after the death of her three children in a methamphetamine fire was excused from the hearing to attend their funeral.
Neibi Brito was scheduled for a 1:30 p.m. probable cause hearing Wednesday in Gwinnett County Magistrate Court, but the hearing was rescheduled for 8:30 a.m. Thursday.
The Gwinnett County Sheriff's Department agreed to postpone the hearing so Brito, 22, could attend the funeral for her children.
"We did escort her to the funeral," sheriff's spokeswoman Stacey Bourbonnais told the AJC. "There are times that we do that. It's on a case-by-case basis."
Brito is in the sheriff's custody on a felony charge of trafficking in methamphetamine.
The sheriff allowed her to attend the funeral, in part, because she was not deemed a flight risk, said Bourbonnais. She added that Brito's family will have to pay for the escort.
Her children died after they were burned in a fire Thursday at a Lilburn home where methamphetamine was being manufactured, authorities have said.
Police said the house contained a cache of toxic and highly volatile chemicals used in the manufacture of meth and that four pounds of the drug were somehow ignited.
Investigators said the children -- Isaac Guevara, 4, Ivan Guevara, 3, and 18-month-old Stacy Brito -- suffered severe burns and smoke inhalation. They died after bystanders rescued them from the second story of the burning house.
The funeral for the three children was to begin at 2 p.m. Wednesday at the Willis Funeral Home in Dalton.
Gwinnett County police are still looking for Ivan Gonzalez, 26, a resident of the Lilburn home. He fled the scene and is charged with murder in connection with the deaths of the three children.
Bourbonnais, the Gwinnett sheriff's spokeswoman, said the department is investigating why Gonzalez failed to appear on a federal immigration database after an earlier arrest.
In August 2010, according to a report by 11alive.com, Gonzalez was arrested by Gwinnett police after failing to appear in court for an expired vehicle registration. His driver's license identified him as John McGowan-Torres, so sheriff's deputies booked him into the county jail under that alias.
Bourbonnais said Gonzalez's name should have appeared on the federal Secure Communities computer system when he was arrested under an alias on Feb. 10 in an unrelated case. But she said the system had been offline for three weeks.
The Associated Press and AJC staff writer Andria Simmons contributed to this report.
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