Breathtakingly Mournful

"For [Mr. Harris] to enter the car ... when the child had been dead and rigor mortis had set in, and the testimony is the stench in the car was overwhelming at that point in time, that he ... in spite of that -- -- got in the car and drove it for some distance before he took any action to check on the welfare of his child, I find there is probable cause for the two charges contained in the warrant."
Cobb County chief magistrate, Frank Cox

Heartbreaking details: A detective testified Thursday that there was scratch marks on Cooper Harris' face and abrasions on the back of the toddler's head

"What you saw here is what is truly in her. There is an example here for all of us on how to deal with things. I'm not sure there's a better testimony to who You [God] are or what You do than Leanna."
Pastor David Eldridge, Atlanta, Georgia

"There isn't enough to make her a co-conspirator ... yet." Knowledge of a crime isn't prosecutable. A cover-up is."
Esther Panitch, criminal defense lawyer

Familiar face: Leanna Harris, right, wife of Justin Ross Harris, arrives for her husband's bond hearing in Cobb County Magistrate Court Thursday

Justin Harris, an American citizen living in Atlanta has been getting in touch with family members. He has something important to tell them; how they should go about collecting on two life insurance policies taken out in the name of Cooper Harris. Cooper Harris is was all of two years of age, a bubbly, charmingly adorable toddler with blonde hair and a fetching smile, and big, wide-open eyes discovering the world about him.

His parents had taken out $27,000-worth of life insurance on the child. Mr. Harris himself is currently in prison. He has been charged with murder and child abandonment. Which must seem so unfair to him, since he was a loving father who just happened to forget to deliver his child to day care one day on his way to work. Mr. Harris, 33, claims he had simply forgotten, and left his son in the vehicle. The temperature on that day went up to 33.3C.

When Cooper's lifeless body was discovered it had however, dropped to a more comfortable 31C. That's the exterior temperature which in itself is enough to melt a candle standing directly in the sun. In the interior of a locked car it is immeasurably hotter. A dog or a child would die of heat prostration in short order.

When Justin Harris finished work that day he entered his car and began driving off. People who happened to be around when he stopped his car said [the man got out of the car, yelling] "Oh, God, what have I done." Rather discombobulating to say the least, to find that through neglect/carelessness, one is responsible for the death of a vulnerable child one cherishes as its father.

Which must be why, when people standing around called on him to dial for an ambulance, he responded by contacting someone to inform them the boy was dead, but it wasn't 911 he had dialled. Police arrived quite swiftly, suggesting the bereaved father get off the phone and he responded by swearing at them and generally behaving rather oddly necessitating that he be handcuffed. Imagine: handcuffing a grieving father.

Police investigating the strange case discovered that the grieving father had conducted Internet searches about children dying in hot cars and just incidentally how to survive in prison. The day that little Cooper Harris died his father was sexting while at work, getting in contact with roughly six women, including a 16-year-old girl to proposition them, sending on explicit photos of his genitals.

Little Cooper's mother Leanna had been informed by workers at her son's daycare that Cooper hadn't been dropped off. Whereupon she said: "Ross must have left him in the car. There's no other explanation." And then, presumably did nothing. When, afterward, she saw her husband at police headquarters she behaved rather uncharacteristically for a devoted mother who had just been informed her only child had died.

"She asked him -- she had him sit down, and he starts going through this. And she looks at him, and she's like, 'Well, did you say too much?'", testified Detective Phil Stoddard of Cobb County Police at Mr. Harris's arraignment. When 30 year-old Leanna Harris called her mother to relay the dreadful loss to her own mother, her mother's voice came back: "Why aren't you crying? Why aren't you reacting?"

"I must be in shock", responded her daughter. And when she delivered the eulogy at Cooper's funeral she commented that even if she could she would not bring her child back, as a good Christian, since: "He's in the most peaceful, wonderful place there is." Her pastor was so pleased. He would not have known, of course, that Ms. Harris too had conducted her own Internet searches about children dying from hyperthermia.

Leanna Harris is not charged with anything relating to the death of her child. Poor woman, she has much to mourn. The death of her child. The fact that her marriage was not a happy one. The arguments about money. And now her husband arrested and charged with the death of their son. It is too, too sad for words. Surely the god this churchgoing family honoured had a better future in store for little Cooper?

Not welcome: Justin Ross Harris was banned from the funeral for Cooper held at the University Church of Christ

Everyone who knows the couple can't lavish enough priase about how gracious, sweet and kind Justin Harris is. Evidence showed that the child had died in an agony of painful discomfort, trying to free himself from the car seat, rubbing his head desperately against the back of the seat, scratching his face in misery, before he died quite a few hours before his father returned to the car.