Justin Ross Harris: Four Minutes on Cumberland Parkway

Justin Ross Harris, known as Ross, was a 33-year-old web developer at Home Depot’s corporate offices in Cobb County, Georgia, outside Atlanta. He and his wife, Leanna, had one child, Cooper, who was 22 months old and attended the company’s on-site day care. He had also been trading sexual messages with many women and with underage girls.

On June 18, 2014, father and son ate breakfast at a Chick-fil-A, and Harris then drove to his office instead of the nearby day care. Cooper spent about seven hours strapped into his rear-facing seat in the parking lot as the day grew hot. Harris opened the SUV at midday to drop off a purchase. Leaving work that afternoon, he pulled into a shopping center lot and took his son out, but Cooper had died of hyperthermia. Prosecutors said Harris left him deliberately to escape family life. The defense called it a tragic memory failure.

With the trial relocated to Brunswick, a jury convicted Harris on all eight counts in November 2016, and he received life without parole plus 32 years. On June 22, 2022, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the murder and child cruelty convictions 6–3, ruling that prejudicial evidence about his sex life should have been excluded. Prosecutors declined to retry him in May 2023. His sex-crime convictions involving a teenage girl stood, and he left custody in June 2025.