As the Volkswagen hurtled toward the Toyota, going roughly 50 mph on a residential street in Decatur, witnesses noticed something strange. It did not slow down. The driver never seemed to hit the brakes.
The Toyota was stopped at a traffic light. Inside were Emory University professor Samuel Jenness and his 5-year-old son, Miles. After the Volkswagen smashed their car, Mr. Jenness looked for Miles in the back seat. Miles was not moving.
It was Sept. 27, 2018. Miles was in kindergarten at Winnona Park Elementary School. He was known as a child full of light and love. In a song he spontaneously composed the previous year, recorded and kept by his mother, later recited by his grandfather at a court hearing, he sang, approximately:
I love you in a cup,
And I love you in the fence
And I love you in a box
And I love you in the small Kroger
And I love you in the big Kroger
And I love you on top of the building
And I love you if you’re a girl or a boy
And I love you if you’re a Mama or a Daddo
Or a teacher
I love you all the time
I love everyone
With help, Mr. Jenness took Miles from the car and set him on the ground. Blood trickled from his nose. His lips were turning blue.
“Deep inside me,” his father would later write in a victim impact statement, “I knew right then he already was dead.”
Credit: Courtesy Photo / Jenness Family
Credit: Courtesy Photo / Jenness Family
The trial began on Tuesday, almost eight years after the crash. The Volkswagen’s driver was Michelle Wierson, a psychologist from Avondale Estates. The charges included vehicular homicide. Wierson did not deny having driven the Volkswagen that killed Miles Jenness. But she did plead not guilty by reason of insanity.
Her story, advanced by defense attorneys and approved by at least one forensic psychiatrist, boiled down to this:
On the day of the crash, she had a psychotic episode that detached her from reality. And as she rushed toward her fatal collision with a stranger, she was trying to save her 8-year-old daughter’s life.
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
***
Wierson was 52 that day in 2018, with a history of bipolar disorder. She managed this condition well enough to help others with their mental health as a licensed psychologist. But 2018 was a bad year for Wierson. A close friend died suddenly. Her father entered hospice care.
There are questions about how all this affected Wierson’s treatment. Prosecutors have alleged that Wierson stopped taking certain medications in the weeks before the crash. Wierson’s attorneys dispute this. The issue of whether Wierson voluntarily went off her medication — and whether prosecutors could use that allegation against her in court — went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court.
The judges ruled last year that prosecutors can’t overcome the insanity defense by claiming a patient was noncompliant with prescribed medication. It was a victory for Wierson, and presumably others who plead insanity in the future, but it didn’t end her prosecution.
Without a doubt, Wierson behaved strangely on the day of the crash. Attorneys wrote in a court document that a neighbor saw her “running down the street, barefoot and bleeding,” and Wierson told the neighbor “she believed that her daughter is going to commit suicide.”
Less than half an hour before the crash, Wierson called 911. As she waited on hold, a recording captured her desperate cries. She was raving about something, apparently trying to talk with a daughter who was not there. Finally, an operator answered. Wierson was unable or unwilling to describe her emergency.
Alarmed, Wierson’s mother also called 911.
“I called because my daughter is having a psychotic break,” she told an officer. She added that Wierson was dangerous.
By then, Wierson had left in the Volkswagen. She was headed to her daughter’s school, apparently responding to an imaginary crisis, on her way to creating a real one. At Midway Road and South Candler Street, she collided with the Toyota Corolla, where Miles Jenness and his father were stopped at a traffic light.
***
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
Leah Tracosas Jenness was at a work retreat in Oregon when she got a voicemail from a neighbor saying that her husband and son had been in an accident. She rushed to the airport and waited for a red-eye flight home to Atlanta. When her husband called from the hospital room to say there wasn’t much more the doctors could do, she screamed.
“A piece of me died that day,” she would later write in a victim impact statement, “and it’s still there, forever screaming in the Portland airport.”
She made it to the hospital, slept by Miles, held his hand.
“I kept my hand on his heart when they withdrew life support,” she wrote. “I felt it steady on until slowly it got fainter and fainter. I saw his body move as the life left him. The last time I saw him move was as he died.”
About seven years later, on Dec. 8, 2025, friends and relatives of Miles read statements in court. His kindergarten teacher recalled students asking her if they could also die in a car crash. Family friend Kelly Brown said her son Kian went to class the Monday after Miles died. He saw a jacket that had belonged to Miles:
“He remembers, all these years later, that he desperately wanted to take Miles’ jacket from the hook and move it to his chair so it wouldn’t be empty, and so he could pretend Miles was just coming in late, or maybe just out for the day. But he didn’t dare touch it. Miles’ jacket stayed hanging beside Kian’s for months.”
As they fondly recalled Miles, the friends and relatives also voiced disagreement with the proposed plea bargain.
“With this plea,” Sam Jenness wrote, “there is nothing stopping Dr. Wierson from doing this all over again in 3 years: her having another mental health episode, getting behind the wheel, committing homicide, and then claiming no responsibility for her actions. We cannot let the Decatur Kindergarten Killer, as Dr. Wierson is now known to everyone in the community, kill again.”
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
The state’s case against Wierson had been damaged by the Georgia Supreme Court ruling, which ruled out an argument that she’d been noncompliant with her medication. Given those circumstances, prosecutors offered a deal that included no jail or prison time. Wierson would enter an Alford plea, acknowledging the evidence against her while maintaining her innocence. This proposal left DeKalb Superior Court Judge Courtney L. Johnson in what seemed like disbelief.
“There’s incarceration, there’s probation, there’s fines, there’s community service, there’s a myriad of conditions that I could impose,” she said.
“But where is the accountability?”
After some back-and-forth with the judge, defense attorney Bob Rubin said, “And when I understand the court to say accountability, I’m hearing some kind of punishment.”
“Correct,” Johnson said. “Because punishment is part of a sentence.”
The judge said that in 15 years on the bench, she’d never seen a vehicular-homicide case without jail time. And with that, she rejected the plea deal. She proposed an alternative that included two years in custody. The defense rejected that offer. The case would go to trial.
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
***
They gathered again in Johnson’s courtroom on Tuesday morning, and prosecutor Josh Geller made his opening statement. The high court’s ruling had forced an update on the theory of the case.
He’d admitted to the judge in a previous hearing that the state had been “hamstrung by the Supreme Court’s decision,” and “we were left with little” after that. But the Jenness family was demanding justice, and the judge had scheduled the trial, so Geller forged ahead.
Now, without mentioning medication noncompliance, he said that Wierson had been “lucid, present and aware” at the crash scene. She’d been alert and coherent when talking with a police officer at Grady Memorial Hospital. And whatever she believed when she was behind the wheel, it wasn’t enough to excuse what she had done.
“I want to get this out there now, because that’s what the defense is going to ask you to do in this case,” he told the jury. “That it’s OK to drive double the speed limit, and kill a child, because you have to get to your child, because you think they might be in danger.”
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
Credit: Jason Getz/AJC
He conceded that Wierson had bipolar disorder. But he said mania was not the same as insanity.
Then it was Rubin’s turn. And in defending Wierson, he let the jury hear her own words from about 20 minutes before the crash. The 911 recording she made. There was something haunting about it, the harsh juxtaposition of her desperate cries with the repeated message of an automated system that kept her on hold. “Please, God,” she kept saying as she spoke her daughter’s name.
“Psychosis means you’re detached from reality,” Rubin said.
And so it went, from morning to afternoon: competing versions of the same horrific event, the prosecution emphasizing moments when Wierson seemed sane and the defense pointing out moments when she seemed insane. There were both kinds of moments on the day of the crash. Sometimes she behaved normally, and sometimes not. She was cooperative and responsive, Lt. John Bender of the Decatur Police Department said on the witness stand. But he also said on body camera that she seemed “high as hell,” and pictures showed that she’d smeared what appeared to be lipstick all over the inside of her vehicle.
Much had changed since that day in 2018. Wierson, free on bail and taking higher doses of medication, tried to get on with her life while also defending herself in a felony case. After a probationary period ended, her state psychology license was renewed in 2024. But attorney Kristen Novay said her practice is not what it used to be, and Wierson is financially destitute.
What is justice in a case like this? It was late Tuesday afternoon, with the trial continuing the next morning, the potential of a jury verdict in the next week or so, and the judge decided that was enough for one day. The Jenness parents left the courtroom. There were tall windows in the seventh-floor hallway looking out over Decatur Square, and on the eastern horizon, you could see Stone Mountain. They walked together down the hall.
Some things would remain the same regardless of the trial’s outcome. The Jenness family would still have two other sons: one age 4 and the other about a year and a half. And the parents would remember the brother those boys never knew. A boy who loved to hold his mother’s hair.
Not long after the crash, Leah’s sister made a braid in Leah’s hair. She cut off the braid. Leah brought it to the hospital morgue so her little boy could hold it in his casket.
Credit: Courtesy Photo / Jenness Family
Credit: Courtesy Photo / Jenness Family
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