The ex-wife of a Georgia dad convicted of leaving his son to die in a hot car so he could be free to sext with underage girls – believes it was all an “accident.”
Leanna Taylor defended her ex Justin Ross Harris, who was sentenced to life without parole in December for the death of their 22-month-old son Cooper, in an interview with ABC 20/20.
“It never crossed my mind that Ross had done it on purpose,” Taylor said in the segment that aired this week. “Never. It was an accident.”
But jurors saw the tragic death otherwise, finding Harris guilty on eight counts, including malice murder and felony murder.
Prosecutors said Harris purposely left Cooper inside his sweltering SUV, parked at his workplace, for seven hours in June 2014 instead of dropping him off at day care and that he researched child deaths in hot cars before that day.
Taylor first learned something was wrong when she went to pick up her son that afternoon.
“The day care teacher … said, ‘Well, Cooper’s not here.’ and I thought she was joking, and I was like, ‘No really, where’s Cooper?’” she said. “And she just looked me dead in the face and got my attention. She was like, ‘He’s not here.’ I didn’t know what to think.”
The mom’s mind immediately went to Harris.
“Nothing else that my mind was going to made sense,” Taylor said. “The next place my brain went was, ‘Well, maybe Ross left him at home, like, maybe he just forgot to take him to daycare.’ … he could be a forgetful person.”
Taylor said surveillance video showing Harris returning to his car at lunchtime that day to put something away proves her belief that he didn’t mean to kill the boy.
“The going back to the car part actually for me solidifies that it wasn’t intentional,” she said. “To me, it said the opposite, that he didn’t have a clue Cooper was there.”
At the time, Harris, who was married to Taylor at the time, was having online and in-person affairs with multiple women, including an underage girl he was sexting.
“There was evidence in our relationship that would suggest that he would be capable of being unfaithful to me,” Taylor said. “There was no evidence in our relationship that suggested that he would harm anyone, much less his own son.”
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