A Georgia mother charged in the hot car death of her 1-year-old son asked a judge for a bond so she can attend his funeral.
Deja Coleman, 29, has been held without bond in the Gwinnett County Jail since the tragic incident at Northside Hospital Gwinnett on July 29.
Coleman’s defense attorney Tom Ford asked the state to drop her murder charge so a judge could set bond to allow her to attend Saturday’s funeral.
Ford offered to let prosecutors re-indict Coleman after the funeral.
“It would be a resolution in good faith recognizing lack of prior history, recognizing the circumstances of the arrest,” Ford said during a hearing on Tuesday.
However, Assistant District Attorney Megan Matteucci rejected the request. “We’re ready to proceed on the warrants that police took,” Matteucci said, according to Channel 2 News.
“I don’t have any authority to grant bond,” the judge told Ford and Coleman in court.
Ford waived the hearing, and the judge sent the case to Gwinnett County Superior Court, according to WSB-TV.
Ford spoke with reporters after the hearing.
“A dead child in a car with a wailing mother in the parking lot is not murder,” he 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!”
Ford is calling for federal legislation to include backseat sensors in all new cars to prevent children from being left in hot cars.
He called the baby’s death “an honest, human error” caused by sleep deprivation.
“We do not punish folks in this country for being human,” Ford said in a statement. “The answer is engineering. Spending a couple of hundred dollars on a sensor when a car is built will ensure no more babies suffer an unimaginably horrific death.”
Coleman told police she dropped her other two children off at daycare and drove to work at the hospital on July 29. Coleman said she arrived at work around 6:50 a.m. and forgot her son who was sleeping in his car seat.
Hours later, a hospital employee walking by the car noticed the baby boy “slumped in the car seat” and banged on the window, but there was no response. The employee called 911, WSB-TV reported.
Emergency responders tried CPR to revive the baby, but he had been dead for hours. An hour after his body was removed, the temperature inside the car was 117-degrees.
Gwinnett County Police Captain Dena Pauly said she located Coleman inside the hospital after running the car’s tag. Pauly said Coleman “was devastated” when told that her son was dead.
A bond motion, viewed by Channel 2 News, describes Coleman as a domestic violence survivor who lives at a transitional housing community in Gwinnett County.
She was working as a certified nursing assistant and raising a 6-year-old child with nonverbal autism, a 4-year-old child, and the baby alone.
The bond motion says she was deprived of sleep and was on a phone call her husband required her to make every morning as she dropped the older two children off at daycare and drove on to her hospital shift.
Coleman’s 2 other children are in the care of their father while she is in custody.