A second Cobb County police investigator testified Wednesday he could smell an odor of death inside Justin Ross Harris' Hyundai Tucson hours after Harris pulled his dead son out of the SUV.
“Normally, I’d associate (the smell) with death,” Carey Grimstead, a former crime scene investigator, told jurors.
Grimstead said he detected the “sickly” smell when he processed the car more than six hours after Harris pulled into the Akers Mill Square shopping center and said he’d just realized he’d left Cooper inside his hot car for hours that day.
Cobb prosecutors, who contend Harris intentionally left Cooper in his car to die, are expected to tell jurors if the odor was so strong, then why did Harris drive a few miles from his office parking lot before pulling over into the shopping center. They will argue the only explanation is that Harris already knew his son was dead.
Already, two other Cobb police officers have testified they also detected a strong smell inside Harris’ SUV. One of them, Capt. James Ferrell, preceded Grimstead on the witness stand Wednesday. Ferrell said he noticed an odor at the shopping center parking lot when standing close to the opened driver’s side door. He then stuck his head in and took a sniff.
“It was a combination of smells,” Ferrell testified. “It smelled like sweat. It smelled like a diaper, because those diapers smell like diapers. And then it smelled like the odor of death.”
Grimstead, who is now a homicide detective, also identified a number of photos and a video he took of the SUV, which show Cooper’s rear-facing car seat in the back seat and wedged between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat.
Grimstead measured the distance from the top of Cooper’s car seat, which was where his head would have been, to the top of the driver’s seat. He found they were only 3.5 inches apart. This helped underscore the prosecution’s contention that it would have been difficult for Harris to miss the fact that Cooper was in the car before he left him there that morning and walked into his Home Depot office.
The 22-month-old boy died of hypothermia after being left in the hot car for seven hours.
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