At 1 p.m. Saturday, 17-month-old Daniel Coleman will be memorialized in Atlanta. As of Friday night, it was unclear whether his mother will arrive at the mortuary in handcuffs. After a fraught legal battle, she won permission to attend the service. Deja Coleman will arrive in a police car. She may or may not be handcuffed. The sheriff’s office will decide whether she can wear civilian clothes appropriate for a funeral or if she will be in a green polyester prison jumpsuit. Coleman has been incarcerated since July 29, the day she accidentally killed her son.

Last month, Coleman, 29, forgot to drop her youngest child, Daniel, off at daycare after she walked her other two children, ages 6 and 4, inside; she soon left Daniel in her car in the employee parking lot of the hospital where she worked as an assistant nurse, and he sweltered to death. Neither Coleman nor the police contest that narrative. By all accounts, what happened to Daniel was an accident occasioned by sleep deprivation and stress. Friends describe Coleman as a cheerful, upbeat person and a devoted mother. Her pastor, Jesse Hardy, said “she would run through a brick wall for those children.”    

What makes this case unusual is that Coleman has been charged with second-degree murder. In Georgia, such a crime carries a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 10 years.  

This unspeakable tragedy happens alarmingly often to parents from all walks of life — mothers and fathers of every race, rich and poor, absentminded and fanatically organized. The phenomenon has a name: Forgotten Baby Syndrome. I researched it years ago when first writing about “death by hyperthermia,” the official designation of this modern, macabre type of death, when children pass after being forgotten in their car seats. From 1998 to 2025, an average of 38 children a year died in hot cars in the United States. Experts who study the sometimes deadly collision of memory and stress have concluded these are physiological failures of memory, not love — and many say that incarceration for a mistake is neither a just punishment nor a deterrent.  

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These cases present a moral dilemma for law enforcement professionals. As of 2025, roughly 40% of the time, prosecutors do not file charges at all, when there is no additional negligence. In some cases, the parent is charged with a lesser crime, such as involuntary manslaughter. In the remaining instances, there are more serious charges, sometimes in response to public pressure. 

Deja Coleman’s case presents facts that make Georgia officials’ decision to throw the book at her difficult to comprehend. Among them: 

When Coleman set out to take her three sons to daycare that morning, the “home” she left was a shelter for abused women, where she and her boys had been living for more than a year. For reasons of safety, her husband — against whom she had gotten a temporary restraining order — had not been informed of where she was living or where their children went to school. Doors were kept locked and visitors screened. Despite the couple’s history, officials in Gwinnett County, Georgia, handed the other two children over to him after her arrest. (I called her husband for comment but did not get a response.)

Other disturbing facts: When Coleman woke around 5 a.m. that day, she had barely slept. Baby Daniel was teething and fussing, and her attorney later described Coleman’s condition as “medical-grade sleep deprivation.” At the daycare center, Coleman walked in with her two older sons. That was her custom. Her oldest child, 6-year-old Dinero, is nonverbal and generally requires special attention. One of the teachers later said that the usually ebullient Coleman looked drained of energy, with a flat affect. She brought in Daniel’s diaper bag and said she’d be back with him momentarily. But she never returned. The teachers were busy, and nobody was counting heads. 

“Incarcerating Deja is not going to bring Daniel back, and it will not prevent the next hot-car death,” said Amber Rollins, executive director of the nonprofit Kids and Car Safety. Rollins traveled to Georgia this week to meet Coleman and try to provide grief support but was denied entry by the sheriff’s department, which cited Covid-19 protocols. She asked for a video visit, which is still being negotiated. 

“These tragedies are not necessarily the result of parents recklessly disregarding their children’s safety. They can be the result of catastrophic failure of human memory. The common denominator is not bad parenting. It’s human vulnerability,” Rollins said.

In my original Washington Post reporting, I spoke with Ed Hickling, a clinical psychologist from Albany, New York, who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. “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,” he said. “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.”

Coleman’s lawyer, Atlanta attorney Tom Ford, has argued — so far unsuccessfully —  that the charges against Coleman should be reduced and that she should be released on an unsecured bond. These motions were denied. After the funeral, Deja Coleman will be returned to prison; her next hearing is not until Sept. 9.  

There is a compounded tragedy in that delay. Coleman’s oldest son is profoundly autistic. He communicates mostly in unintelligible sounds. When asking the court to grant Coleman’s release on bond, Ford argued that her continued incarceration was an unconscionable added cruelty to a vulnerable innocent: “The only person on the planet that her nonverbal six-year-old son can communicate with is her,” he told the judge, to no avail. 

Amid these heartbreaking facts, there is one slim silver lining: Ford persuaded the children’s father to hand the boys over to someone better equipped to care for them: They are living with Pamela Adrien, the administrator of their daycare center. Adrien is a friend of Coleman’s and has children of the same age, with whom Coleman’s boys get along. 

She and Ford conspired to help Coleman communicate with her kids from jail by FaceTime. 

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

Dakota, the 4-year-old, asked, “Mommy, did your baby die?”

“Yes,”  she said. 

Both were silent for a moment.  

“It’s OK, Mommy,” Dakota said, “I forgive you.”

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