This is one of those articles I couldn’t do in a few graphs. It’s nearly 900 words, and every word was needed to tell this story. For those pressed for time, I’m offering a quick version below. Keep reading after for the full story.
TL;DR
A baby should still be alive, and his mother is responsible for leaving him in that car. The Black women in the comments who understood how it could happen were not excusing her; they were recognizing what chronic exhaustion and cognitive overload can do to a human mind. Accountability matters, but prevention also requires us to build families, communities and systems with safeguards that do not depend on one woman carrying everything perfectly.
The Full Story
I went to the comments ready to see why these women could not understand … because when I first saw the story, I understood.
According to police, a 29-year-old mother dropped two of her children off at daycare, drove to work at a Georgia hospital, and forgot her one-year-old son was still strapped in the back seat.
Nearly nine hours later, somebody found him.
He was dead.
There is no making that less horrific.
A baby should still be alive, but my first thought was not, How could she?
My first thought was: I get it, ‘case, baby, I’m t’ied.
Not regular tired.
Not “I stayed up too late watching TV” tired.
I mean the kind of tired where your body is in one place, and your mind is already three stops ahead.
The kind where you are standing in the kitchen trying to remember what you came in there to do while mentally answering an email, calculating what is left in the bank account, and wondering whether anybody took the chicken out of the freezer.
The kind where you drive somewhere on autopilot and come back to yourself at a red light.
The kind where you look for your phone while you are talking on it.
So when I was told the women in the comments were criticizing her, I went looking.
Let me see why these women can’t see it, I thought … because surely I cannot be the only one who knows how close exhaustion can bring you to the edge of yourself.
The Black women understood.
One mother said leaving her child in the car was one of her worst fears.
Not something she could ever imagine doing.
Something she was afraid she might do.
Whew.
Another woman asked why the daycare did not ask about the baby when his mother brought the other two children inside.
Now, we do not know whether all three children attended the same daycare. We do not know whether the baby was expected that morning or what the center knew … but listen to the instinct behind her question.
She was searching for the interruption.
The moment when somebody else might have noticed.
The question that could have stopped everything: Where is the baby?
That is what struck me about the Black women in those comments.
They were not excusing what happened. A one-year-old little boy spent nearly nine hours inside a hot car while his mother worked. By the time somebody saw him, he was gone.
Nobody was making that smaller … but they were not rushing to turn his mother into a monster so they could feel safer either.
They understood.
The horror was not that we could not imagine how a mother could forget her own child.
The horror was that we could.
We know what it feels like to be in motion before our minds have fully caught up with our bodies.
We know the kind of morning where somebody cannot find a shoe, the gas light is on, one child is moving too slowly, another needs something signed, your phone is ringing and you are already calculating how late you are going to be.
We know what it feels like to pull into the driveway and realize we do not remember the drive home.
To put something down and lose it while our hand is still leaving it.
To drive toward work on a Saturday because our bodies know the route better than our brains know the day.
To wake up in the middle of the night with our hearts pounding because we suddenly remembered what we forgot.
We know what it is to be tired in a way sleep alone cannot fix.
So when that mother said this was one of her worst fears, I understood exactly what she meant.
She was not saying, “I leave my children in the car.”
She was saying, “I know my mind has limits. I know how much I carry, and I know that, on the wrong day, one missed step could become something I cannot take back.”
Most of us have had the missed step.
What we have not had is the catastrophic outcome.
Something interrupted us.
The child spoke.
The phone rang.
Somebody asked a question.
We doubled back.
The smoke alarm went off.
Grace met us in the gap.
It did not meet Deja Coleman there.
When “strong” means nobody came to help
I do not know this woman.
I do not know what she was carrying that morning. I do not know whether she was exhausted, distracted, overwhelmed, or running on fumes.
I will not take our collective recognition and turn it into a diagnosis.
I will not ignore that recognition either.
Black women know how to function past full.
We know how to get up already tired and start running the list before our feet touch the floor.
Who needs to be where?
What time do I need to leave?
Did I sign the form?
Does everybody have lunch?
I need gas.
I do not have time to stop for gas.
I forgot to answer that email.
What are we eating tonight?
Why does this child only have on one shoe?
Where is my phone?
Your hands are packing a bag while your mind is answering an email, remembering the doctor’s appointment, calculating the bank balance and replaying the conversation you did not finish last night.
Then somebody asks how you are doing.
“Girl, I’m tired.”
And we both know you are not talking about sleep.
Still, you keep moving because things have to get done, and somewhere along the way, you became the person who gets them done.
That is why people call us strong, but sometimes strong does not mean she has the capacity to carry it all.
Sometimes strong simply means nobody came to help, so she adapted.
When you manage the impossible often enough, people begin to mistake your adaptation for your capacity.
They think because you carried it yesterday, it was yours to carry today.
They think because nothing fell last time, the load must not be too heavy this time.
Sometimes we start believing it too.
Until something breaks.
Where was the second safeguard?
This is where the story meets my work as a human-systems strategist.
I developed ALIGN to help us examine the distance between what we intend, what people actually experience, and the outcomes our systems produce.
The intention that morning was painfully ordinary: take three children safely to daycare and go to work.
The outcome was that one child never made it inside.
Between those two truths was a gap wide enough for a baby to die in.
There appears to have been no second safeguard.
No question about the missing baby.
No attendance alert.
No call.
No car-seat alarm.
No vehicle warning.
No interruption until nearly nine hours had passed.
One human mind was the primary safety system.
When that mind failed, the consequence was irreversible.
This is not about letting Deja off the hook.
She is responsible for leaving her baby in that car. She has been charged with second-degree murder and cruelty to children. The criminal legal system will determine what legal accountability looks like, but punishment cannot be our entire prevention strategy.
Accountability requires her to answer for what happened.
Prevention requires the rest of us to answer some questions too.
Why do so many family systems depend on one woman never reaching her limit?
Why are we still treating human memory as fail-safe when we know it is not?
Why do we praise women for carrying impossible loads instead of questioning why the load is theirs?
What should happen when a baby expected at childcare does not arrive?
Why can a car remind us that our seat belt is unfastened but not always recognize that a child remains in the back?
How many women are holding together lives that have no room for human error?
How many of us are one disrupted routine, one sleepless night, or one missed step away from a mistake we cannot take back?
That is what I heard in those comments.
Not excuses.
Recognition.
Black women looking at another Black woman in the worst moment of her life and refusing to pretend we have never felt our own minds stutter under the weight.
We know what it is to carry so much that details begin slipping through the cracks.
Most of us have been protected by an interruption, another person, a reminder or plain old grace.
She wasn’t.
A baby should still be alive.
His mother will have to live with the fact that he is not.
The rest of us have to decide whether we will look at this tragedy and simply say, “I would never,” or tell the harder truth: We understand that kind of tired.
Understanding it does not erase responsibility.
It asks us to build lives and systems that do not require any woman to carry so much, so perfectly, all by herself.
A Little Something to Sit With
For the sisters who want the research after the reflection:
Of the 1,041 pediatric vehicular-heatstroke deaths examined between 1998 and 2025, 52.9% involved a child forgotten by a caregiver. More than half of the children who died were younger than 2. NoHeatStroke.org, San José State University
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says plainly that even attentive parents can forget a child in the back seat. It identifies disrupted routines as a known risk and recommends layered reminders rather than relying on memory alone. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
Research has found that interruptions, multitasking, and fatigue are associated with task errors—even among highly trained emergency physicians. Competence does not make a human brain immune to overload. Westbrook and colleagues, Annals of Emergency Medicine
Dr. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé’s research on the Superwoman Schema found that many Black women described feeling obligated to project strength, suppress vulnerability, succeed despite limited resources, and care for others. Those adaptations can help us survive while also carrying psychological and physical costs. Woods-Giscombé, Qualitative Health Research
None of this tells us exactly what happened inside Deja Coleman’s mind that morning.
It tells us why so many Black women saw the story and did not have to ask how a person could become that tired.
Let Me Pour You a Bowl
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