Hot car death expert: Ross Harris actions not unusual

VININGS, Ga. - The Ross Harris case hit so close to home for parents who could not understand how someone could forget their child so quickly, especially when you see how close Cooper's car seat was positioned to his father.

In the summer of 2014, when the FOX 5 I-Team watched Cobb County authorities replicate the conditions that led to Cooper Harris' death, we were struck by how close his car seat was to the front seat. Only a few inches from here Ross Harris' elbow would have been.

How could a father forget his son was with him when his head was positioned only a muscle twitch away?

Easy... said the group that monitors such tragedies.

"The simple fact is that unless you know there's a child back there... in these cases the parent loses awareness the child is in the back seat," pointed  out Amber Andreasen, the director of KidsAndCars.org, a non-profit group that tracks child car deaths and advocates for ways to prevent them.

"Yeah, it is very close," she admitted when asked about where Cooper's head was in relation to his dad. "But I could have something behind my elbow right now and I wouldn't see it because if I'm facing forward and focused on the road, I'm driving. I'm not looking back there for things."

Since Cooper's death two years ago, 69 other children have perished in hot cars in our country according to Andreasen's group. They post pictures of children who have died in hot cars., an average of 37 every year. The group says few ever result in serious criminal convictions.

Harris claimed Cooper's death is also a horrific accident, a case of forgetfulness that happened within one minute of eating breakfast with his son. That's when he chose to go straight to his office rather than take a left on Paces Ferry in the direction of Cooper's child care center.

Instead, Harris drove a half mile down Akers Mill to his office, leaving Cooper in the backseat to die in temperatures that outside reached 88 degrees that day. Authorities have not publicly revealed the results of their tests of temperatures inside the car.

Nearly 7 hours later, Harris would drive his son one last time. But it still took him a mile and a half before he says he realized Cooper was there all along. In all those other hot car death cases, how often does a parent get into a car with a child who has died, and not realize it immediately?

"You know, actually that's very common," Andreasen explained. "We see a lot of times where the parent actually gets in the car, drives to the day care at the end of the day to pick the child up, walks inside and the day care provider tells them the child was never dropped off. And it's only when they go back out to the car that they realize the baby had been in the vehicle all day."

There is one aspect of this case that is not typical: prosecutors said Harris was sexting with as many as six women during the time his child was dying of heat stroke in the parking lot outside his office. Does that help prove a motive for murder? Or provide an explanation as to why Harris would be so distracted, as revolting an excuse as that might be?