I am a kindergarten teacher, a school founder and a parent, and I have spent my life working alongside children and families at their most vulnerable, witnessing both the extraordinary resilience people carry and the devastating consequences when systems fail them.
In 2018, my friend experienced a severe mental health crisis, resulting in a fatal car accident that killed a five-year-old Decatur child. When I look at his photograph, I break down every time. I see a child who loved life in the full, unguarded way only young children do, a child who should still be here and nothing I write will ever make his death anything other than devastating. Nor should it.
Sept. 27, 2018, is a day that permanently altered many lives, and seven years later, we are still struggling to decide what justice actually looks like when tragedy collides with severe mental illness.
I met Michelle in 2015 while working at an Atlanta Independent school. She is a child clinical psychologist and a single parent who adopted her daughter at birth and was raising her with the support of her parents in Avondale Estates. I remember the day her daughter walked into my classroom life, a tiny, quiet Black girl with a serious expression and eyes that seemed far older than her years. During admissions discussions, a veteran teacher with nearly twenty years at the school said simply, “We need to accept this child. We need this family in our community,” and when he spoke like that, people listened.
Our daughters were the same age, and I watched them grow up together. Michelle and I became close, two single parents navigating exhaustion, hope, responsibility and love, and what unfolded over the next several years is one of the deepest friendships of my life. Michelle was reliable in a way that is rare. She volunteered constantly, showed up to every parent night, supported classrooms quietly and without recognition, and when my own little brother, a veteran, died by suicide in 2017 after years of untreated mental illness, Michelle cared for my daughter when I could barely care for myself. She helped me survive a period of grief that nearly broke me, and she helped me remember that life could still hold meaning.
She did all of this while her own world was quietly unraveling.
In 2018, Michelle’s partner, her daughter’s father figure, died suddenly in a boating accident, shattering their family. Her daughter was eight years old. Around the same time, Michelle’s father was placed in hospice and Michelle was also trying to help her daughter’s birth mother navigate the prison system for nonviolent offenses, actively working to support her release. When Michelle spoke to me about everything she was carrying, she did so with hope and generosity, not despair, describing how she was trying to hold people together and protect her child’s sense of stability. At the time, I did not know Michelle had bipolar disorder, an illness she had managed responsibly for decades under medical care.
A week later, I received a call from the school principal telling me there had been a terrible accident. A child was critically injured. Michelle had been arrested, and no one knew where she was.
That night, an attorney friend and I were the first people to go to the jail to try to see Michelle. I was not allowed in, but my friend came out shaken and told me simply, “Michelle wasn’t there tonight,” explaining that the person she encountered bore no resemblance to the woman we both knew.
Michelle spent the next month in a psychiatric facility, where it was determined that she had experienced a psychotic break, a catastrophic medical collapse of the mind. As part of that psychosis, Michelle held a fixed and terrifying belief that her daughter was in immediate mortal danger, a compulsion that drove her to get into the car in an attempt to protect her child. During the time she was in the hospital, my family cared for her daughter, and I remember taking her to visit her mother, watching the joy and devastation move across both their faces as they held onto each other.
In the years that followed, Michelle did everything she was told to do and more. She stopped driving entirely, submitted to regular psychiatric and psychological evaluations, complied with treatment plans and fought to keep her professional license, passing multiple board reviews and assessments that deemed her fit to practice.
When the pandemic hit, Michelle and I were both watching low-income children lose access to stable education, and I made the leap to launch The Morgan Oliver School, a microschool committed to serving children in person when so much else was unraveling. Michelle volunteered daily, coordinating schedules, supporting students and helping wherever she was needed. I could not have begun that journey without her steadfastness and quiet commitment. She showed up every day to support children with care and consistency, while her mother faithfully drove her and her daughter to school. She never asked for sympathy or special treatment, only the chance to contribute for no pay and a relentless determination to do good.
As the case dragged on unresolved, the weight of it hollowed her out. Some days, she could not get out of bed. The grief and guilt over the accident never left her, and she began to shrink inside herself, carrying a burden that no human being could escape unchanged. Michelle had devoted her career to supporting marginalized children and veterans with mental health challenges, yet as media coverage resurfaced repeatedly over the years, her daughter began to understand what had happened and her own joy and stability eroded, too.
Eventually, a parent Googled Michelle’s name and demanded she no longer be allowed to volunteer at school. Michelle had passed background checks, had not been convicted of a crime and was under the care of multiple leading mental health professionals. I called every family using a script I had written and told them the truth. Every family but one stayed, because our community understood that a mental health crisis does not define a person forever.
A child died, and a family was forever altered. Nothing changes that.
But Michelle has also lost nearly everything: her home, her community, her ability to be gainfully employed and contribute to society and her financial stability. She lives with profound depression, enduring grief over the accident every day of her life and the knowledge that a single medical collapse will shape her future indefinitely. Multiple medical professionals have concluded that she was legally insane at the time of the accident, meaning that her brain was so impaired by psychiatric collapse that she could not understand or control her actions, much like someone experiencing a stroke or seizure. The court’s own expert forensic psychiatrist holds this opinion, alongside two additional expert forensic psychiatrists and at least four other mental health professionals who independently concluded that she was psychotic at the time.
Last month, a plea deal offered the first sense of resolution we had felt in years. When the judge asked what consequences Michelle had faced, the courtroom fell silent as the attorneys struggled to respond, and I could not stay quiet. I stood and named the years without driving, the loss of her career and home, the thousands of hours she had volunteered and I was told to sit down.
But I have not survived my life by being quiet or sitting down.
Michelle is not a murderer. She experienced a psychiatric emergency with catastrophic consequences, and this is not my opinion but the determination of medical experts. People, not the media but members of the public, have used dehumanizing language to describe her, yet she did not get in her car intending to harm anyone, and she was not in control of her actions at the time of the accident.
People ask what accountability looks like if prison is not the answer, and I can tell you what it has looked like for nearly eight years: no driving, no career, no anonymity, constant supervision, mandated treatment, financial ruin, and a life lived under irreversible harm. Her daughter is now homeschooled due to crippling anxiety and fear that her mother will be taken to prison and leave her entirely alone. Accountability has already happened; the question is whether we will now mistake cruelty for closure.
Sending Michelle to prison will not bring a child back, will not heal a grieving family and will not protect other children. It will, however, almost certainly push another vulnerable child into crisis.
Michelle does not need prison. She needs care, protection and ongoing medical support. Her daughter does not need to lose her only parent. If we cannot hold grief, medical reality and humanity at the same time, if we cannot imagine ourselves or someone we love in her place, then we must ask what kind of justice we are truly practicing.
Michelle is not the problem here.
This system is.
