Was It An Evil Plan or a Mistake?- The Story of Cooper Harris

Was It An Evil Plan or a Mistake?- The Story of Cooper Harris

“He was full of life—adventurous, definitely. We got quite a number of phone calls from daycare: ‘Cooper was climbing on the table and fell over and bumped his head.’ Go, Cooper! Go, Cooper! He was just happy all the time. If you’re happy and you know it, shout hooray!”

This is the story of Cooper Harris.

Cooper Mills Harris was born on August 2, 2012, to Justin Ross Harris and Leanna Harris in Marietta, Georgia. He was said to be a very happy, social, and calm baby. Cooper liked talking to everyone he met. He also loved trucks and cars, and he often waved and told them “bye-bye” as they passed him.

Cooper’s parents, Justin—who went by his middle name, Ross—and Leanna had gotten married in May 2006, and Cooper was their only child.

On the morning of June 18, 2014, Cooper’s father, Ross, was bringing him to daycare. Cooper went to daycare only about a mile away from where Ross worked, so Ross was usually the one to bring him in during the morning. Ross also sometimes picked Cooper up after work, but oftentimes this was Leanna’s responsibility.

That morning, on their way to work and daycare, at around 8:57 a.m., they stopped for breakfast at a Chick-fil-A restaurant. It was less than a mile away from Ross’s office building on Cumberland Parkway in Vinings, Georgia. The father and son went inside the restaurant and ate breakfast sandwiches together.

Once they were finished, they headed back out to the car at around 9:20 a.m. At this time, Cooper was awake, and Ross carried him out of the restaurant. When Ross put Cooper back into his car seat, he buckled him in, gave him a kiss, and said, “Ready? Let’s go.” Cooper then kissed his dad back.

From there, Ross drove directly to the Home Depot TreeHouse office where he worked instead of driving to Little Apron Academy and dropping Cooper off at daycare. When Ross left Chick-fil-A, he should have turned at the intersection of Paces Ferry Road and Cumberland Parkway in order to head toward Cooper’s daycare. Instead, he went straight through the intersection and proceeded to work.

Ross’s job at the Home Depot office was only about six-tenths of a mile away from the Chick-fil-A and would have taken approximately four minutes to reach. Ross pulled into his office parking lot, got out of his car, grabbed his work bag along with a Chick-fil-A cup, and walked into his office at approximately 9:25 a.m.

Little Cooper was still strapped into his rear-facing car seat inside his dad’s Hyundai Tucson.

At around 12:30 p.m., Ross went to lunch with a few coworkers at a nearby Publix. However, they took a coworker’s car, so he still did not notice that he had left Cooper behind that morning. Following lunch, Ross and the other men made a quick stop at Home Depot, where Ross purchased some light bulbs.

After his coworkers dropped him back off in the office parking lot, Ross walked over to his car, opened the driver’s-side door, and put the light bulbs inside. He did not see his son in the back seat. At this point, Cooper had been sitting there for about four hours.

At 3:16 p.m., Ross even texted his wife, Leanna, asking when she was going to pick up his “buddy” from daycare, referring to Cooper. So, he was thinking about his son, but he did not remember that Cooper was still in the car. Even though he had his son on his mind, he still did not realize what had happened, which I find a little odd.

Then, one hour later, at 4:16 p.m.—about seven hours after Ross had left Cooper in the car—Ross returned to his SUV, got in, and drove away from the office. He headed north on Cumberland Parkway toward the nearby AMC theater because he was planning to see 22 Jump Street with some friends.

After driving for only a few minutes, he suddenly pulled into the Akers Mill Square shopping plaza. Witnesses reported hearing squealing tires and seeing Ross jump out of the car, screaming, “What have I done? What have I done?”

Ross frantically tried to get Cooper out of his car seat. An onlooker saw him struggling and came over to help. That same onlooker later gave Cooper CPR after Ross attempted it very briefly himself and then gave up.

Ross also did not call 911 himself. He tried to call Cooper’s daycare and then Leanna, so several bystanders called 911 to get help for Cooper.

Meanwhile, Leanna was on her way to pick Cooper up from daycare, not knowing what had happened. When she learned that her son had never arrived that day, she came to an immediate conclusion. She said, “Ross must have left him in the car. There’s no other explanation. Ross must have left him in the car.”

I think it is strange that she jumped immediately to that conclusion the second she found out he had not come into daycare. This was even before she spoke to Ross. He could have taken Cooper on a father-son outing or done something else. She had no idea, yet the first thing she came up with was that he must have left him in the car.

The temperature on that hot summer day had reached 92 degrees Fahrenheit, or 33 degrees Celsius. Inside a closed car, the temperature could reach as high as 140 degrees in a matter of hours.

When police arrived at the scene, Ross seemed very distressed. However, officers later said that his mood fluctuated back and forth between frantic and calm. Although he was not formally placed under arrest at that point, he was put in the back of a police cruiser with handcuffs on so officers could ensure that he did not leave the crime scene.

[Music]

“I understand now. I understand. I understand.”

“My wife is going to pick him up. We need to call her as soon as possible. She’s going to get there, and he’s not going to be there.”

“What’s your name?”

[Music]

“What have I done? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. My boy. My boy.”

[Music]

Police estimated that Cooper had died around noon, approximately two and a half hours after Ross left him in the car.

At 10:00 p.m. that night, Ross was arrested and brought in for questioning. He told police that he thought he had brought his son to daycare and had completely forgotten that Cooper was still in the back seat. Detectives, however, thought some of his responses during the interrogation were rather odd.

One officer reported hearing Ross say, “I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’ll be charged with a felony. Why am I being punished for this?”

Because you killed your son.

Another odd detail from the interrogation was that Ross forgot to tell police he had bought light bulbs at Home Depot that day. He also failed to mention that he had walked back to the car and placed those light bulbs inside while Cooper was still there.

Security footage from the parking lot where Ross worked showed his friends dropping him off after lunch. It then showed Ross walking over to his SUV, placing the light bulbs inside the driver’s-side door, and walking away.

“Pay attention. Can you see inside the vehicle?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well, did you see kind of a blur go across the windshield there?”

“It looks like an arm going in.”

When Leanna Harris arrived at the police station to see her husband, she was allowed into the interrogation room to speak with him. Although both were visibly upset at first, things soon calmed down and then became a little unusual.

At one point, Leanna asked Ross whether he had said too much to the police. Ross also told Leanna that he would not bring Cooper back if he could. That’s right—I said would not. He explained that it was because Cooper was in heaven, but what parent would ever say they would not bring their child back if they had the chance? A guilty one, in my opinion.

An autopsy conducted the following day confirmed that Cooper had died of hyperthermia. His body showed injuries consistent with a struggle to free himself from the car seat while he was dying. He had scratches on his face and abrasions on the back of his head and neck.

Initially, police believed the toddler’s death had simply been caused by absent-mindedness. However, suspicions grew as the investigation continued, and police soon announced that they did not believe Cooper’s death was an accident.

Ross was charged with malice murder, felony murder, cruelty to children, dissemination of harmful materials to minors, and sexual exploitation of children. I will get into those last two charges in just a minute because they did not directly involve Cooper, but they did relate to what Ross was doing on the day his son died.

Ross Harris pleaded not guilty.

When Ross was arrested and charged, the case triggered a wave of sympathy as well as a vigorous debate over whether the father should be punished. However, as new information began to emerge, two organizers of Change.org petitions shut down petitions that had been created to get Ross out of jail.

Witnesses at the Akers Mill shopping plaza, where Ross pulled in after discovering Cooper, had varying opinions about Ross’s guilt. Many, however, believed he was guilty.

One witness—the person who took over CPR—noticed that Ross had been fumbling and performing it improperly. An officer who arrived at the scene thought it was odd that Ross was not even near his son when she arrived. Many people also believed Ross’s emotions were merely an act.

Investigators obtained a search warrant for the Harrises’ Marietta condominium and seized a number of items from the home, including an iPhone 5, a laptop computer, Ross’s 2011 Hyundai Tucson, a computer tower, and other electronic devices. Investigators were looking for any evidence of child mistreatment or neglect.

While searching these devices, investigators found that Ross had previously searched for information about how hot it needed to be inside a car for a child to die. Leanna, Cooper’s mother, had also searched for the same thing.

When Ross was later confronted about this, he said he had only searched for it because he was afraid it could happen to him. Investigators also found internet searches about child-free lifestyles and how to survive in prison.

Police also examined Ross and Leanna’s marriage to determine whether there were problems between them. What they discovered was that Ross had sent numerous explicit text messages and pictures to other women, as well as to underage girls.

He had been texting seven different women and sending explicit photos. He had been doing some of this on the very day his son was dying inside the car. Ross had profiles on several dating sites, as well as on Kik and Whisper.

On the day Cooper died, Ross responded to four different Whisper posts. In one of them, he mentioned that he had gotten up at 5:30 that morning to take care of his son. When the poster asked about Cooper, Ross said that he was “awesome.” Clearly, he had his son on his mind, but he still did not realize that he had left him in the car several hours earlier.

On Whisper, an app that encourages users to share secrets, Ross said that he missed having time to himself. He also wrote that he hated being married with a child, saying that the novelty had worn off and he was left with nothing to show for it.

In another Whisper message, Ross wrote, “I love my son, but we all need escapes.” This was posted around the same time that he and Cooper were going to Chick-fil-A on the morning Cooper died.

Detectives then discovered even more. They learned that the couple had been experiencing financial problems and that Ross had taken out not one, but two life-insurance policies on his son—one for $25,000 and another for $2,000.

They would not even need this money to pay for Cooper’s funeral because the funeral was eventually covered by a grant from Home Depot, where Ross worked.

During the investigation, while Ross was being held in jail, he wrote instructions to his family explaining how to cash out Cooper’s life-insurance policies.

Ross told detectives that he had approximately $4,000 in credit-card debt, as well as student loans and loans on two vehicles. This only fueled further suspicion.

Detectives believed that Ross, who was clearly cheating on his wife, dreamed of having a child-free life and that getting rid of Cooper was his solution.

Leanna Harris, however, continued to believe that Ross was a wonderful father who loved Cooper with all his heart.

Ross had previously told Leanna that, during the drive from Chick-fil-A to his office building, he had not heard a single peep from Cooper. According to this explanation, Cooper may have fallen asleep, causing Ross to forget that he was in the car.

Leanna agreed and said that Cooper must have had a belly full of sausage biscuits and fallen asleep. But it was a four-minute drive. I know children can fall asleep easily, but it was still only a four-minute drive.

There was also the fact that Cooper’s nursery-school teachers said that, when he had previously gone to breakfast with his dad in the morning, he usually arrived afterward full of energy.

Originally, Ross’s attorney fought to have Ross tried separately on the charges involving sexual messages sent to underage girls. One girl was 15 at the time, and another was 16. However, the prosecution wanted those charges included in the murder trial to show what Ross had been doing while Cooper was dying in the hot car.

The judge ultimately allowed those charges to be included in the murder trial, as the prosecution had requested.

Ross’s trial was originally scheduled to be held in Cobb County. However, the judge granted the defense’s motion for a change of venue, and the trial was moved to Brunswick in Glynn County. The court determined that local media coverage had affected the potential jury pool in Cobb County.

Ross Harris’s trial began in January 2016. His attorney insisted that Cooper’s death had been an accident and that nothing in the state’s evidence could prove otherwise.

The prosecution, however, believed that Ross had intentionally murdered his son by leaving him in the hot car that day. Prosecutors argued that Ross had deliberately left Cooper in the car so he could pursue his extramarital affairs. They believed he had decided he wanted a child-free life.

The defense argued that Ross left his son in the car because his daily routine had been altered. But the Chick-fil-A where Ross had taken Cooper was, as I said, only about six-tenths of a mile from his workplace. The father and son had also visited that same Chick-fil-A for breakfast before, prior to Ross dropping Cooper off at daycare.

How do you forget your child in such a short period of time—four minutes and about half a mile? How?

In total, the prosecution called 51 witnesses, while the defense called 18.

A Cobb County Police crime-scene technician was the first witness for the state. Graphic photographs and video were shown to the jury, depicting the young boy’s body lying on the asphalt outside his father’s silver SUV in June 2014.

In those images, Cooper’s eyes were open, and his legs appeared frozen in a bent position from sitting in the car seat inside the hot, locked vehicle. This was the result of rigor mortis beginning to set in.

Several witnesses testified about Ross’s behavior at the scene, including multiple police officers.

One officer testified that, when he arrived at the scene that day, Ross was not even near his son. He also said that he did not observe Ross crying and believed Ross was faking his grief. According to the officer, Ross would shift from calm to shrieking and then back to calm again, and the behavior did not make sense.

The police officer who transported Ross to the station also testified. She said Ross attempted to make idle chitchat during the ride, which was not something she expected from a person who had just lost his child.

Once they arrived at the police station, Ross again tried to engage her in what she described as casual conversation. He commented that the handcuffs she had used were different from the ones he had used while working for police in Alabama.

Okay, cool. Your child just died. Who gives a [__] about handcuffs? What a strange thing to talk about.

Another witness described Ross’s futile efforts to breathe life back into his son’s limp body. The witness said Ross tried to revive Cooper, but after only a few compressions and breaths, he walked away.

Ross’s defense claimed that he had simply been too overwhelmed with grief to concentrate on performing CPR.

The jury was then told about the evidence showing Ross had been sending sexual messages to six other women, as well as two underage girls. Prosecutors described how he had been messaging women for months and had met with prostitutes behind his wife’s back.

The prosecution said that, on the day Cooper was dying, Ross was texting a 16-year-old girl and trying to obtain explicit photographs from her.

Ross’s attorney immediately objected to testimony about the sexual messages, arguing that it was irrelevant to Cooper’s death. The objection was overruled.

Ross’s attorney described his client’s texting behavior as “gross, filthy, and graphic,” but argued, “His sex life, no matter how perverse, nasty, and wrong we think it is, doesn’t have a thing in the world to do with the fact that he forgot that little boy. Nothing.”

The state’s evidence also included multiple explicit photographs Ross had sent to women on the day Cooper died. Prosecutors also raised the fact that he had met with prostitutes only days before his son’s death.

Ross’s sexual behavior had interrupted time with his son on other occasions as well. He had sent explicit photographs to multiple women while attending an Atlanta Braves baseball game with Cooper.

Ross would later admit that he was a sex addict.

Evidence also showed that Leanna had prior knowledge of her husband’s infidelity. She eventually filed for divorce in February 2016.

Leanna testified for the defense. She said that, even though Ross had ruined her life and humiliated her, he would never have intentionally killed their son.

Leanna also testified that Cooper’s car seat was rear-facing and positioned in the middle seat of the back row of Ross’s Hyundai Tucson SUV. She claimed that Cooper’s head was at least two inches below the top of the car seat.

She further testified that a photograph taken on April 20 showed Cooper sitting in his car seat with the top of his head still below the top of the seat. Leanna said Cooper had not experienced a growth spurt since then, although one of his daycare teachers testified to the exact opposite.

The defense also called several character witnesses for Ross. In general, they described him as a loving father. However, the prosecution challenged those witnesses by pointing out that they had not known about Ross’s extramarital affairs before the trial.

Investigators recreated as many details of the crime scene as possible, and what they discovered did not help Ross’s case.

They found that Ross could, in fact, have seen his son in the back seat from his position in the driver’s seat.

Investigators also discovered that Ross had received a group email from Cooper’s daycare that day, but the message still failed to jog his memory about his son.

It was also said that Ross should have noticed the terrible odor inside the car when he opened it that afternoon. Testimony described the smell as overwhelming.

According to teachers at Little Apron Academy, Ross usually dropped Cooper off at daycare between 8:30 and 8:45 a.m. on his way to work. However, he was frequently late, and on days when he was running behind, he would notify the daycare no later than 8:40 a.m.

On the day Cooper died, at 8:55 a.m.—15 minutes after the normal time by which Ross would have called—Ross and Cooper were still leaving Chick-fil-A. Ross never called Little Apron Academy to say they were running late or to mention that Cooper had already eaten breakfast, even though he had done so in the past.

Another unusual detail noticed by one of Cooper’s teachers was that, in the weeks before Cooper died, Ross had suddenly stopped taking photographs of his son. This was something he had previously done every day.

Leanna said this was simply because Cooper was getting bigger and running around more, making it harder to take pictures of him.

At the end of the trial, on November 14, 2016, Ross Harris was found guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 32 years.

In January 2017, however, Ross’s legal team filed a motion for a new trial. They argued that the revelations about Ross’s numerous affairs and his self-admitted sex addiction had made it virtually impossible for him to receive a fair trial.

That motion was denied on May 20, 2021.

Then, in January 2022, the Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments from Ross’s legal team about why he should receive a new trial.

On June 22, 2022, the court ruled that evidence presented during Ross’s trial regarding his sexual activities had mainly served to make him look like a terrible person. As a result, Ross’s murder conviction and his conviction for cruelty to children were overturned.

Because crucial motive evidence admitted during the first trial was no longer available to the state, the district attorney made the difficult decision not to try Ross Harris again. Therefore, he was no longer facing punishment for Cooper’s death.

Ross did, however, remain convicted of felony attempt to commit sexual exploitation of children and dissemination of harmful materials to minors. At the time described in this story, he still had approximately five and a half years left to serve before his release.

To this day, Cooper’s mother, Leanna, still does not believe that her ex-husband Ross planned their son’s death. She also does not believe that he should remain imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Little Cooper’s funeral service was held on June 28, 2014, at University Church of Christ in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A private burial followed at Tuscaloosa Memorial Park Cemetery.

Thank you for listening to Cooper’s story today.

Cooper’s dad was clearly too self-absorbed and too focused on his own disturbing desires to properly care for his son. Had he not been involved in so many relationships outside his marriage, perhaps he would not have forgotten his son in the car that day.

Whether he did it intentionally or not, I personally believe that he did. It is also unbelievable to me that Leanna has no doubt in her mind that Ross is innocent.