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LOS ANGELES — Every few minutes Thursday, someone would lean over the ninth floor courthouse balcony, standing on tiptoes to peer over the wall. 

Next to a single bouquet of red and white carnations, they craned their necks to see the roof five stories below where a young mother threw her two young daughters to their deaths, then jumped to her own. 

When sheriff’s deputies saw the 27-year-old woman on the ledge of the downtown courthouse about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, they didn’t know she had already thrown her children, ages 5 and 7. 

The deputies tried to talk her down. About five minutes later, she jumped. 

“Anyone with the resolve to throw their own children off the roof certainly is unlikely to be talked down themselves,” police Capt. Charlie Beck said. 

The dead woman was identified as LaShanda Crozier of Los Angeles, said coroner’s spokesman Scott Carrier. The dead girls had not yet been identified, he said. 

The woman and her husband were in court earlier in the day for an eviction hearing, but “it was not contentious,” said sheriff’s Capt. Jay Zuanich of the courts service’s central bureau. 

The family had agreed to make payments that would allow the family to stay in their southwest Los Angeles home, Zuanich said. 

Police said the family left the courthouse, but the woman and her daughters later returned after the father went to work. 

How quickly they returned was not immediately clear. A courthouse employee who spoke on condition of anonymity said he saw the three about two hours before they died on the other side of the building’s wraparound balcony. 

He pointed to a foot-high wooden crate against the 4-foot-high balcony wall and said the woman stood on it, looking over the edge while her children played. “I just thought, ’I don’t know why you need to stand on a crate when you’re on the ledge, anyway.”’