Jurors on Friday were shown police video of Justin Ross Harris just hours after he said he'd experienced his "worst fear" — finding his son's lifeless body in the back of his SUV.
During his interview with two detectives, Harris matter-of-factly answered their questions while occasionally taking deep breaths in apparent anguish. When finally told he would be criminally charged, Harris turned argumentative.
Harris sat alone for several minutes before the detectives entered the interrogation room. During that time, he occasionally began sobbing aloud. He cried out, “My God. My boy.” He paced. He grabbed his hair. He put his face down on the table.
The video provided the first glimpse of Harris giving his own firsthand account of what happened June 18, 2014, when his 22-month-old son Cooper died after being left seven hours in Harris' hot SUV. Prosecutors, who say Harris intentionally left his son in the car, contend the former web developer manufactured his sorrow in the interview room.
Harris, 35, told the detectives he got off to a late start that morning and decided to take Cooper to breakfast at Chick-fil-A before dropping him off at daycare.
“It’s one of the few things we do together as a daddy and son,” Harris said. “It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
Harris said he regularly ate at the Chick-fil-A on Cumberland Parkway near his Home Depot office and the Little Apron Academy, where Cooper went to daycare.
"We were leaving Chick-fil-A. I put him in his car seat," said Harris, who was asked to recall what happened that day. "I strapped him in, tightened it up. I gave him a kiss. He gave me a kiss. Like I do every time."
Harris said his regular routine, when eating at Chick-fil-A by himself, was to leave the restaurant, make a U-turn and drive straight to the office.
“I think that’s what got me,” he said. “Today I was careless. I went straight to work. … I didn’t even hear him because he probably went to sleep.”
Cooper was left inside Harris’ SUV, where temperatures soared above 120 degrees, for seven hours.
Harris said he realized Cooper was still inside his car that afternoon when he was driving to meet friends at a 5 o’clock movie.
"As I was driving down Akers Mill I caught a glimpse of him when I looked to the right when I was changing lanes," Harris recalled in the video, recorded about two hours after he pulled over. "I thought I was seeing things. Then I lost it."
He said he tried to give his son CPR but “couldn’t compose” himself to do it.
“I saw him laying there,” he said. “He had that stare on his face. I knew he was gone. His eyes were open half-way. He wasn’t breathing. He didn’t have a pulse.”
“I knew what I had done,” he said.
Harris told detectives he was aware of public service campaigns warning parents about leaving children and pets in hot cars. He said he’d watched videos about it on the Internet and had been practicing a look-back routine to make sure he wouldn’t make the mistake he made that day.
“My worst fear is to leave my son in a hot car,” he said.
Prosecutors also played the video of Harris' then-wife, Leanna Taylor, meeting him in the interrogation room. Harris breaks out wailing the moment he sees her.
After they embrace, Taylor told her husband, “I do not hate you. I love you. … I know you’re sorry, you don’t have to say it.”
Later, when Harris tells her he’s going to be criminally charged, Taylor asked, “Did you say too much?”
Harris said he never meant to do such a thing. “My life is over,” he said. “I can’t believe I did this.”
During the days and weeks leading up to Cooper's death, Harris had been trying to hook up with multiple women for sex. It's unlikely Taylor knew the extent of her husband's philandering.
“We’re going to be a couple that makes it through this,” she told Harris in the interrogation room. At one point, she asked him if they could have children again.
“I know you didn’t do this on purpose,” she said.
Taylor divorced Harris early this year. She is expected to be a key witness for Harris’ defense.
Earlier Friday, a 19-year-old North Georgia woman testified that Harris asked her to send him photos of her private parts just hours before Harris was taken into custody.
The woman testified she started up an online relationship with Harris in September or October 2013 when she was a 16-year-old high school junior. Their chats eventually turned sexual and continued to be so until the day of Cooper’s death.
Cobb County Superior Court Judge Mary Staley Clark ordered the woman's identity not to be disclosed by the news media because she was a juvenile when she had the internet relationship with Harris. Prosecutors presented her testimony to prove three counts in the indictment. One, a felony with punishment of up to 10 years in prison, accuses him of persuading the girl to send him lewd photos of herself. The other two counts are misdemeanors.
The woman testified Harris sent her photos of his genitals — sometimes at her request — over a period of months beginning in late 2013. On several occasions, the teenager said, she sent him nude photos of her breasts.
This includes sending such a photo to Harris shortly after 2 p.m. on June 18, 2014, the last day of Cooper’s life.
The woman testified she was aware that Harris was married, but he told her he’d never leave his wife. He also loved his son, she said.
“You never thought he’d do anything to hurt his baby,” defense attorney Maddox Kilgore said to the woman.
“No, definitely not,” she responded.
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