BRUNSWICK — Even before they put a sheet over 22-month-old Cooper Harris' lifeless body, Cobb County police treated his father like a criminal.
"If you left a child inside a car and the child dies, then it's a criminal case," Cobb police Capt. James Ferrell testified earlier this week, indicating police made up their minds before reviewing any evidence. "It was a criminal case for certain in my mind when we got there."
By then Justin Ross Harris — accused of intentionally leaving his son inside his hot car to die — was already in handcuffs. By 10 p.m. that evening, June 18, 2014, he was charged with murder.
That was before investigators knew of his sexting habits and extramarital trysts. Minimal evidence had been collected. No witnesses had fingered Harris in his son’s death.
But there was the so-called stench of death, which, three Cobb officers have now testified, emanated from Harris' vehicle. While Cobb police have not specified what led them to charge the former Home Depot web developer with murder, that "unmistakable odor" must've been a factor. Prosecutors contend Harris, who said he drove from work for a few miles before noticing his son's body, ignored the smell because he already knew Cooper was dead.
Yet none of those officers noted the stench in reports filed from the scene. Lead detective Phil Stoddard mentioned that he and Ferrell had smelled it during his testimony at Harris’ probable cause hearing a little more than two weeks after Cooper’s death. Ferrell and former crime scene investigator Carey Grimstead, now a Cobb detective, referenced the odor in supplemental reports completed about a year later.
On the stand, they described the smell in strikingly similar terms.
“Once you’ve smelled it … you know what it is,” Grimstead testified. “It’s very difficult to explain that smell to someone who’d never smelled it before.”
Former medical examiner Joe Burton, who has performed more than 10,000 autopsies and now works as a private consultant, said he doesn’t dispute the officers smelled something but insists it wasn’t death.
“To say that there was an odor you can detect that was indicative of something dead isn’t consistent with what happens in the real world or facts,” Burton said in an interview. He’s not associated with the Harris case. “I’m not saying they didn’t smell an odor. I’m just saying there is no odor that would be detectable to let you know something was dead in the car.”
While the state has struggled to prove a whiff of mortality from within Harris' Hyundai Tucson, they had more success establishing deviations in the defendant's routines on the day of Cooper's death.
According to testimony from teachers at Little Apron Academy, where Cooper attended daycare, Harris usually dropped off his son between 8:30 and 8:45 a.m. On the mornings he was late, he would call the academy by 8:40 a.m., one of Cooper’s teachers testified. But there was no such call on June 18, 2014 even though Harris was running well behind schedule. Surveillance footage shows him leaving Chick-fil-A with Cooper at 8:55 a.m.
Teacher Keyatta Patrick testified Harris had stopped taking pictures of his son two weeks earlier, as he had done every day after dropping him off at Little Apron. She asked Harris about it, testifying that he told her it was due to Cooper “getting older.”
Meanwhile, this week marked the first mention of Cooper’s mother, Leanna Taylor, who was married to Harris at the time. Though now divorced from the defendant, Taylor, according to her attorney, Lawrence Zimmerman, continues to believe their son’s death was an accident. It’s expected she’ll be called by both sides to testify at trial, though she might be a bit hostile to the state, which at one time hinted at her possible involvement in Cooper’s death.
Testifying at Harris' probable cause hearing on July 3, 2014, Det. Stoddard said Leanna seemed indifferent upon learning of her son's fate.
She acted, Stoddard said, as if she already knew.
“Ross must have left him in the car. There’s no other explanation,” Stoddard testified she said, describing her reaction when informed by Little Apron employees Cooper had never been dropped off that day.
That was contradicted by testimony this week from Michelle Gray, who stayed with the children at the daycare until their parents picked them up. She said she was the first Little Apron employee to speak with Taylor on June 18.
“What are you doing here?” Gray said she asked Taylor. “Cooper’s not here.”
Taylor was “confused, she was frantic,” Gray testified. Asked by lead defense attorney Maddox Kilgore if Taylor seemed genuinely surprised her son was absent, Gray replied, “Yes,” and said she told Cobb police the same thing when interviewed on July 1, 2014.
Stoddard never mentioned that during his testimony two days later.
On Friday, the state continued to poke at Taylor, calling a Home Depot corporate security officer who testified he was with Taylor when her son’s death was confirmed.
“She went from hot to not, to me,” Wesley Houston said, adding she arrived at her husband’s office with a full head of steam. But after a while “she was just sitting there like nothing happened. She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She didn’t show any emotions.”
But under cross-examination Friday, Cobb police Det. Ray Yeager confirmed Taylor was not a suspect and, upon searching her electronic devices, found “nothing incriminating.”
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Justin Ross Harris is the subject of the second season of the AJC's podcast series "Breakdown," which will follow the trial's developments. You can check out the podcast at ajcbreakdown.com or at iTunes' podcast store.
