Cruel .... But Not Unusual

Seventeen years ago I wrote a magazine story about parents who accidentally leave their children to die in hot cars. The story became famous, and I became naively convinced that the attendant publicity would change people’s awareness, and then their behavior. That the story would save lives.

That never happened. The horrifying deaths keep occurring year after year in state after state in roughly the same heartbreaking numbers. But I clung to another, lesser hope: That gradually the public would become aware of the neuroscience behind this tragedy — a mental hiccup to which anyone is potentially vulnerable, especially when under stress — and stop demonizing the parents to whom this happens. And that this understanding would percolate to law enforcement officials who would stop dealing with these cases as crimes, but as what they are, tragic accidents: documentable, measurable neurological failures of memory that can befall, and have befallen, good parents from all walks of life. They are mistakes that will punish the parent far more profoundly than any punishment a court can or should mete out.

That also hasn’t happened.

And right now, in Gwinnett County, Georgia, it’s not happening again, with a particularly appalling ferocity.

The woman at the top of the page is Deja Coleman, a 29-year-old nursing assistant at a hospital. Pictured beside her is her one-year-old son, Daniel. He died a week and a half ago in her car in the hospital parking lot. Severely sleep-deprived and under overwhelming emotional stress, Ms. Coleman had driven her three boys to daycare, but forgotten to drop off Daniel, who was asleep in his car seat. She just drove on to work.

Deja has the same look on her face that I saw in the dozens of other mug shots I looked through in researching my original story. It is exactly as I described it then: "the haunted, hunted, naked-eyed look these parents always have, up against the wall.” Whether the parent is male or female, White or Black, affluent or poor, educated or barely literate, perennially absentminded or fanatically organized, the look is the same. Overwhelmed, zombified, drowning in shame. Because at that moment in their lives, they are all the same person. Or non-person.

I found out about this case only two days ago. I am going to include only the details I have confirmed. I think it may be all you need to know.

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On the afternoon of July 29, passersby noticed an unresponsive baby inside a car in the employee parking lot of Gwinnett Northside Hospital, in Lawrenceville, Ga. They called police, who smashed in a window, but Daniel Coleman was beyond help. Police located the mother, who was still at her job 200 feet away, and told her. She screamed that she thought she had dropped Daniel off. She was, a police spokeswoman said, “devastated.”

It turns out Deja Coleman had been under more than a normal amount of stress, and the lack of sleep was the least of it. The home Coleman was living in was an apartment in Rainbow Village, which exists, in part, as a shelter for abused women. She’d been living there for more than a year. For reasons of safety, her husband had not been informed of where she was, or where the children went to school. The doors were kept locked and visitors were screened.

Coleman was brought in for questioning. In about half of these car-death cases nationwide, authorities decide not to prosecute. In a little more than half of the rest, they charge a relatively minor crime, such as involuntary manslaughter or child endangerment. In the remaining cases, they … escalate.

The Gwinnett County prosecutor charged Deja with second degree murder, a crime that in Georgia carries a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence. No bond was set; she remains in custody.

Then they handed the children over to their father.

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First, the science. Forgotten Baby Syndrome — a term that was coined by researchers in response to my initial article — is not an official medical diagnosis, but it describes a phenomenon that has become well recognized among researchers who study the intersection of emotion, stress, and memory. The first two can overwhelm the third, particularly when a fourth factor kicks in: Sleep deprivation.

Deja Coleman awoke around 5 a.m. on the morning of July 29 at the shelter, after having slept almost not at all because baby Daniel was teething and fussing. At the daycare center, she walked in with her two older sons but not Daniel. That was her custom. The oldest child, six-year-old Dinero, was autistic and nonverbal and needed special attention. One of the teachers later reported that the usually ebullient Deja looked drained of energy, with a flat affect. She had brought in Daniel’s diaper bag and said she’d be back with the child momentarily. But she never returned. The teachers were busy, and bustling. Nobody was counting heads. No questions were asked.

The police and prosecutors concede that that is exactly what happened. No one contends there was anything intentional. Everyone admits this was a mistake, and only a mistake. But, still. Murder Two.

I talked to Tom Ford, a lawyer from Atlanta. He is representing Coleman, pro bono. He has experience in similar cases. This is what he says:

“The state of Georgia has chosen a path devoid of common sense and basic human decency.”

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For years, Deja Coleman did not report her husband’s abuse to authorities. The family was already in financial distress — she didn’t want him arrested. But she could leave.

She told a friend, Pamela Adrien — a director of the daycare center — that she had decided to flee her home with the kids one day, after something happened she knew she could not live with — not so much for her sake as for the children’s.

“She said she was fighting him off in front of children,” Adrien told me. “They were right there, in the vicinity. And the children just kept doing what they were doing. They thought this was normal behavior. And that’s when Deja decided she had to leave.”

“Also…”

She hesitated. She was trying to be polite.

“There were times when they would have intercourse when she didn’t want to.”

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Tom Ford told me the police confiscated Deja’s cell phone, and that on it is evidence that she was physically abused. The police, presumably, have seen it. They had it before they charged her. They also knew she had recently gotten a temporary restraining order against him. Also, that she has no criminal record.

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Deja Coleman is in jail, so I could not reach her. I could not reach her husband. But I did get the phone number of her husband’s stepfather, Eddie Thomas, a marketing exec in Florida.

I was not sure what to expect, but I was not prepared for what he said.

“I believe Deja one hundred percent. He was always hitting her. She was fearful of being beat on. It was a legitimate concern she had, and I say that from the accounts given to me from both of them. Why would he say that if he didn’t do it? I am sure there was physical aggression to Deja. She told me she’d had visible bruising. She said that at times she was not able to go to work because of markings on her face.”

I asked him what his stepson was like. He told me this: Daniel Coleman Sr. had named his youngest son after himself. But also — in a way — his oldest son, too. Daniel’s street name was “Cash.” Dinero, in Spanish, means cash.

Also,

“He was once dismissed from a job because he had a physical altercation with a coworker.”

Also,

“He has been arrested before, assault with a weapon, involving a previous girlfriend.”

Also,

“He is currently out on bond with a pending charge: He was pulled over in a vehicle and they found an unregistered weapon.”

And finally:

“Deja is a perfect mother, in my honest opinion. I love Deja. I completely forgive her for what took place, and I stand with her one hundred percent.”

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When Deja escaped from her house, she was transported to a shelter by an Atlanta pastor she had gotten to know well. His name is Jesse Hardy. She called him and said she’d been brutalized, and Hardy and his wife drove 60 miles to pick her and the kids up.

They’ve remained close. Pastor Hardy told me Deja called him from jail a few days ago:

“She said she’d been in a psych ward for six days, and she said the Lord told her to exercise more patience. She said, ‘I was moving too fast,’ and I think that was it. She was doing too much, and all by herself, and with a child with special needs.”

And,

“She is a marvelous person, bubbly and effervescent. She is a marvelous mother. She would run through a brick wall for those children.”

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Immediately after police released the two boys to their father, two people tried to persuade him to give them to people more suitable to care for them. One was attorney Ford, who tried gentle cajoling. The other was his stepfather, who was perhaps not so gentle in his cajoling. His stepson acquiesced.

The kids are now in temporary custody of Pamela Adrien, Deja’s good friend, the director at the daycare center. She is keeping them at her home, with her kids, who are the same age; they get along fine. They’re still going to the same daycare, with the same teachers. Their routine remains the same, and almost everything seems normal, Adrien said.

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I did not talk to the prosecutors. It seemed pointless: No one disagrees on the facts, and — knowing these facts — they still decided Deja Coleman deserves to spend ten years in prison. That’s their statement, I have decided.

I have seen this attitude before, too many times. It is cowardly and self-righteous. Prosecutors are giving the public what they are convinced the public wants and demands, thus taking no chances that they’ll be criticized for leniency. In that cold, compassionless calculus, they are right.

I explored this in my first story 17 years ago. Humans have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

Back then, an expert told me: “We are vulnerable, but we don’t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”

Georgia is a particularly cruel state in these cases. In 2016, not far away from Gwinnett County, a man named Justin Ross Harris was prosecuted for murder with malice after forgetting his son in his car. He was found guilty and was sentenced to 32 years without the chance of parole. It was crystal clear to most people that this had been an accident, but prosecutors framed it as an act of unconscionable evil, a deliberate attempt to murder his child so he could marry a mistress. Evidence had, indeed, shown Harris had been promiscuously unfaithful to his wife, and a judge permitted that evidence in at trial. The jury was appalled, and convicted Harris even though his own ex-wife — who conceded that she despised him now because he had “destroyed my life” — testified that there was no way he would have murdered his son, because he loved the boy fiercely and unconditionally.

Harris served six years of his sentence before his conviction was overturned. The Georgia Supreme Court found the sex stuff wildly prejudicial. He was set free and will not be retried.

The case is featured in a 2020 movie written and directed by Susan Morgan Cooper. It is titled “Fatal Distraction,” which was the headline from my original story, borrowed with my blessing. It was recently the number one documentary on Amazon.

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On Tuesday, there will be a probable cause hearing in the case, in Gwinnett County. Probable cause hearings are usually pro-forma events — particularly in this case, with a dead child and an uncontested narrative, and an obvious person to blame. But attorney Ford is hoping to turn this hearing into more than that. He has invited the media. He has a plan. He shared it with me. It is a good plan.

I do not know if he will mention this, but I will do it now. Statistically, prosecutors are significantly more likely to seek criminal penalties in these cases when the defendant is dark-skinned.

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There is one more thing. A postscript, if you will.

Tom Ford and Pamela Adrien conspired to let Deja communicate with her kids from jail by FaceTime. This is technically not permitted.

“I’ll take it on the chin and ask for forgiveness later,” Ford said.

Ford and Adrien’s recollections of the conversation are almost identical.

Adrien held the phone up to the kids and Ford held his up to Deja, who was behind a Plexiglas partition.

Dakota, the middle son, asked, “Mommy, did your baby die?”

“Yes,” she said.

Silence for a moment.

“It’s okay, mommy. I forgive you.”

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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And finally:

I am probably too old for this, but The Gene Pool is not going anywhere for at least two years. Please help out, if you have the means. I’d appreciate it.

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