GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — A Gwinnett County mother charged with murder after her 1-year-old son died in a locked car is trying to get out of jail in time for his funeral this weekend, after her attorney’s attempt to trade away the murder count failed in court Tuesday.
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Deja Coleman, 29, has been held without bond at the Gwinnett County Jail since her arrest July 29. Arrest warrants charge her with second-degree murder and second-degree cruelty to children and say she left the boy, Daniel Coleman, in a locked vehicle for hours while she worked a shift at a Lawrenceville hospital.
Coleman was scheduled for a preliminary hearing Tuesday. Instead, defense attorney Tom Ford asked the state to drop the murder charge so a judge could set bond and Coleman could attend Saturday’s funeral, offering to let prosecutors re-indict her days later.
“It would be a resolution in good faith recognizing lack of prior history, recognizing the circumstances of the arrest,” Ford said in court.
Assistant District Attorney Megan Matteucci objected, saying the request had no place at that hearing.
“We’re ready to proceed on the warrants that police took,” Matteucci said.
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The magistrate judge said she had no authority to consider bond in a murder case, and Ford waived the hearing, sending the case to Gwinnett County Superior Court.
Minutes later, Ford stood outside the jail with supporters, a neuroscientist and hot car safety advocates. He declined to let Coleman’s family speak, citing the rules of evidence.
“A dead child in a car with a wailing mother in the parking lot is not murder,” Ford said. “I don’t care what the statute says. It is a mistake! Because you have a dead child does not make it a crime!”
A bond motion Ford filed Monday describes Coleman as a domestic violence survivor living at a transitional housing community in Gwinnett County, working as a certified nursing assistant and raising a 6-year-old child with nonverbal autism and a 4-year-old alone.
The motion says she was running on almost no sleep and was on a phone call her husband required her to make every morning as she dropped the older two at daycare and drove on to her hospital shift.
David Diamond, a University of South Florida neuroscience professor who has studied memory for 45 years, said what happened to Coleman and her son has happened to hundreds of other parents worldwide.
“It represents a flaw in brain functioning. It is a public issue, but it is not a crime,” Diamond said.
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Amber Rollins, executive director of Kids and Car Safety, said her group has counted 1,189 hot car deaths nationwide since 1990 and 22 cases in Georgia like Coleman’s, about half ending without a conviction.
“Deja Coleman has already received a life sentence,” Rollins said.
Congress passed a law in 2021 requiring action on child detection technology, Rollins said, and the resulting safety standard is nearly three years past its deadline.
Jenny Stanley, who lost her 6-year-old daughter Sydney to heatstroke in a car, said it would have saved her child.
“I cannot imagine being in a jail cell having to go through this alone,” Stanley said.
Ford said prosecutors have told him only that they might let Coleman attend the funeral in custody. No bond hearing has been scheduled.
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