GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — A bond hearing is set for a Gwinnett County mother charged after investigators say her 1-year-old son died in a hot car in Lawrenceville in July.
Deja Coleman, 29, has been held without bond at the Gwinnett County Jail since her arrest on July 29.
Coleman faces second-degree murder and second-degree cruelty to children after leaving the boy in a locked vehicle for hours while she worked a shift at a Lawrenceville hospital.
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Coleman was released from jail to attend her son’s funeral last month but has since returned to jail.
A bond motion filed in August says Coleman is a domestic violence survivor who lives at a transitional housing community in Gwinnett County. The motion says she worked as a certified nursing assistant and was raising a 6-year-old with nonverbal autism and a 4-year-old alone.
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The filing 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 children at daycare and drove to her hospital shift.
“It is a mistake! Because you have a dead child does not make it a crime!” Coleman’s attorney Tom Ford said.
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.
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“It represents a flaw in brain functioning. It is a public issue, but it is not a crime,” Diamond said.
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, with about half ending without a conviction.
“Deja Coleman has already received a life sentence,” Rollins said.
The bond hearing is set for 9:30.