GWINNETT COUNTY, GA - A mother accused of leaving her toddler in a hot car, where he died, will be allowed to take her other two children trick-or-treating this Halloween weekend.
On Thursday, October 29, a Gwinnett judge ruled that the woman, 29-year-old Deja Coleman, can visit all four buildings at Rainbow Village, where she is currently living under house arrest with GPS monitoring, WSBTV reported. The same judge previously ruled that Coleman was eligible for bond and was not a danger to her children.
Back in July, Lawrenceville police said Coleman dropped her two older children off at daycare and forgot to make a second trip back to the car to bring the baby inside. She then drove to the hospital, where she worked, and parked in the employee lot before starting her shift around 6:55 a.m.
A hospital employee walking to her car around 3:50 p.m. noticed the boy slumped in his car seat and called 911. Officers working off duty at the hospital broke the vehicle’s window and pulled the boy out, but he was already dead.
Investigators said the temperature inside the car still read 117 degrees an hour after the window was broken. Her six-year-old has special needs, and she told police mornings usually followed a set pattern. “Her normal routine is to take the older kids into daycare, come back and retrieve the baby out of the car seat,” Capt. Dena Pauly said. “And unfortunately, yesterday morning, she forgot to make that second trip to the car.”
Detectives believe that Coleman was not distracted, just overwhelmed. Pauly says officers saw that firsthand once Coleman learned what happened to her son. “She was devastated,” Pauly said.
Coleman has been charged with second-degree murder and second-degree cruelty to children. Her attorney has urged prosecutors to drop the charges, arguing his client experienced what he described as a catastrophic neurological failure brought on by exhaustion, DailyMail.com reported.
Coleman and her children had also been living in a protected domestic violence shelter, the attorney said, arguing that she should be treated as a grieving mother and victim of abuse rather than a criminal. “We’ve labeled a grieving mother a murderer,” he said. “I would submit there’s no charges at all, because to be tired is not a crime.”
He insisted that any exhausted parent could experience the same devastating lapse in memory. “There’s not any other reason other than being tired,” said her attorney. “We don’t lock people up because they’re tired. We look at the end result and assume I could not do the same, but we could all do exactly the same.”
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