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Grace Coleman thinks about her crime a lot — like all the time, every day. Killing two people while driving drunk forced her to start seeing herself through an unfiltered lens of accountability. Since the day after that terrible night in late 2020, she has moved forward through her incarceration and shaped a path into recovery, rehabilitation and mental wellness.
“It’s not even just as simple as, oh, I wake up in prison every day and that in itself is a reminder of the harm that I’ve caused,” she said. “It’s the way that I choose to live my life. It’s being in AA. It’s being a part of these DUI programs. Sharing my story in those spaces, that’s what keeps me sober.”
Her story is not pretty.
On Dec. 8, 2020, Coleman sped through a red light and smashed into a car carrying a family of five. Gabriela Andrade and Henry Saldana-Mejia died. Strapped in the backseat, their three young daughters were injured but lived.
DUI homicides leave surviving victims and communities looking for answers. Without direct intent to harm, the offender can be left struggling to reconcile what they did with who they are.
Some grasp for ways to change for the better. They start searching within themselves for the underlying causes of their behavior.
More than 1,300 alcohol-related driving deaths occur each year in California, but it’s hard to say just how many people are actually prosecuted and convicted for causing these DUI fatalities. Murder statutes do not differentiate whether a homicide charge is attributed to drunk driving.
Coleman faces an era of incarceration where the concept of rehabilitation continues to evolve. Gov. Gavin Newsom has emphasized prison reforms that aim to prepare people for parole and reentry back into society. Decades of mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have slowly given way to trauma-informed programming and better second chance opportunities for those willing to wrestle with the why of what they did.
It’s an arduous journey of self-reflection that many offenders are not prepared to face early on. Some take years or even decades. Some never reach that point. But Coleman did not hesitate to start working on herself right away.
“In the beginning, I was like, all right — I clearly got to get therapy,” she said. “I need to get my mental health in check. Clearly something is wrong with me if I just woke up and found out I killed people. This doesn’t just happen.”
While awaiting trial in Orange County Jail, Coleman met with surviving relatives of Andrade and Saldan-Mejia. It’s rare for criminal offenders to get such an opportunity — even rarer before being convicted. But her defense attorney, judge, prosecutor and the lawyer representing the victims’ family helped facilitate the face-to-face sit down. Coleman listened to their pain, felt their loss and did her best to answer questions through her own tears.
“As a daughter, and as an only daughter, I knew that feeling that my parents were my everything,” she said. “And I just couldn’t even, like, stand the fact that I had taken away the two most important people in a child’s life.”
Soon after that 2022 meeting, Coleman pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and accepted a 21 years-to-life prison sentence.
“For me, it definitely started with that day,” she said. “Like, any bit of denial that I was stuck in was gone. Any bit of selfishness that I still had — and caring about myself and what was going to happen to me — didn’t seem to matter as much anymore.
“But it definitely at the same time brought a sense of hope versus just like all of this devastating hopelessness.”
Jeff Roberts represented the family of Coleman’s victims and remembers her from that private meeting in 2022. He also interviewed her during depositions for a civil wrongful death lawsuit. “I did get to know Grace a little bit, and I know she’s got a story too,” said Roberts. “She had a bit of a broken situation, even though she seemed like a young lady of privilege.”
Roberts would like to see Coleman emerge from prison ready to continue sharing her story and help others avoid drunken driving and substance abuse. He was surprised to learn her sentence does not carry a definitive and clear release date.
“Grace needed to serve a good length of time,” said Roberts. “But I don’t think she needed to serve a life sentence, because quite frankly — that she killed two people and left three people orphaned is a life sentence. Emotionally, she won’t forget about that.”
Mental health while under arrest
Coleman’s dark reality began in a hospital bed after the crash. She woke up groggy, confused, in pain and sedated. Her left arm was in a sling. Her right wrist was handcuffed to the bed’s metal safety railing.
A nurse knew few details, but told her the horrible news while a police officer watched in silence.
“I didn’t know what happened, who I killed, how I even got into my car that night,” said Coleman. “Because the last thing I remembered, I was nowhere near my car — so I had a lot of questions.”
After a few days, they moved her to a medical unit inside the jail. Everywhere was under COVID lockdown at the time. Visits were nonexistent. Communication was sparse. It took weeks for Coleman to piece together all the facts.
Coleman’s boyfriend had driven her home moments before the crash. A day fueled by alcohol, drugs and the tense dynamics of a toxic relationship should have ended when he left her wobbling toward her front door, keys in hand. But in a blackout state, she went to her Range Rover and took off.
Right away in jail, she started seeing a private mental health specialist who was allowed in the jail despite the pandemic lockdowns. Coleman said she’d always believed in the value of therapy, but this was the first time she dove in and embraced the help.
“I talk about it like an identity crisis because you’re stripping yourself, stripping away layers of yourself and going through such a huge transition in your life,” said Coleman.
Weekly therapy sessions and clarity from her newfound sobriety helped Coleman analyze the root causes of her substance abuse. She realized how a fundamental lack of self-worth contributed to codependency issues and people-pleasing belief systems. For years, she’d been the girl who always said yes to everything — always wanted to say yes.
“The crime would have never happened without deep levels of alcoholism, and then, bringing it back to the reasons why I drank or how I even ended up in these alcoholic states,” she said.
As a 22-year-old white girl from Laguna Beach, Coleman feared how other people in jail would react to her privilege and affluence. The story of her crime stayed on the local television news. Everyone knew her face. To survive socially, she needed to connect and empathize with those around her. She needed to walk with both humility and self-assurance.
She turned to her faith in God to quell the crippling anxiety and stress — the same demons she’d once fiercely self-medicated against with alcohol, weed and Xanax. The jail offered hardly any rehabilitative programming, but Coleman did whatever she could think of to stay motivated and productive.
“There was no way that I was going to be able to move forward without creating some sort of spiritual foundation in order for me to even have a reason worth living,” she said.
She organized nondenominational worship groups and recovery groups with other women in the jail. She also began writing down and collecting positive affirmations. She found community through cooking and sharing meals. She exercised fervently and looked for spaces in the small cramped housing to meditate and do yoga.
When high school and college friends visited her, they were startled with how healthy and well she looked. Their last images of her before jail were of her using and being high all the time. They liked seeing the bright, clear-headed person they’d always known she could be.
“That party girl version of me was something that I had to let go of,” she said. “I struggled with that for sure because I felt it was like a part of who I was — being fun and being social. But I realized I could be all of those things without needing to be like, you know, that horrible blacked out friend.”
Welcome to life in prison
The plea deal represented Coleman’s desire to move forward. Although naive to the prison system, she learned during her 18 months in jail how the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation could offer her better opportunities for self-help programming and education.
As soon as Coleman arrived at her first prison in the fall of 2022, other DUI offenders welcomed her into support groups. She listened to stories similar to hers. She realized she did not need to deal with the trauma of her remorse, guilt and shame alone.
She also found healing and catharsis through sharing her experience with others. She became heavily involved in the Alcoholics Anonymous community. She discovered FADD — Felons Against Distracted and Drunk Driving.
The road through mental health therapy, however, became more difficult with the transition into prison. Coleman maintained some phone sessions with her private therapist, but it was never the same as their in-person conversations. And relying on the prison healthcare system at Central California Women’s Facility meant a barrage of randomly assigned psychiatrists and psychologists with different styles of treatment, different strategies and different agendas.
Within prison culture, seeking and receiving mental health care left Coleman vulnerable to stigmatization and judgment from her peers. Participating in therapy or being on prescribed medication can be perceived as signs of weakness. People worry about how the parole board might react to psychiatric diagnoses.
“I come from the generation who very much believe in mental health and therapy as a positive thing and, like, a healthy thing,” said Coleman. “So coming into the prison system and there being this whole stigma, but also fear of it, was very different to me.”
She found herself at a crossroads as she adapted to the rigors of long-term incarceration. Many offenders her age might choose to continue with the same lifestyle that brought them to prison. They fight. They act out. They indulge in contraband and substance abuse.
Coleman chose a different crowd. Her focus on self-help and rehabilitation put her in circles with women two to three times her age who’d been in the system for decades.
“Everybody’s older than me,” she said. “I’m always the youngest by like 20 years.”
She saw how parole hearings do not equate to a guarantee of release. All around her, she observed the effects of aging in prison. It made her question her own future.
“I look at older women in here and especially like older women who do the same things I do,” she said. “Because one day, they could be me or I could be them. Having a life sentence, I know that my way home isn’t promised.”
Mental health decisions
Because steadfast sobriety is so central to her recovery and rehabilitative mindset, Coleman believed that antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication could be a step backward. She declined psychiatrists’ offers of prescriptions.
Exercise, yoga and support groups continued to be her go-tos for finding stability. Her faith in a higher power kept her grounded.
In October 2023 Coleman transferred to the lower security facility of California Institute for Women in Chino. It offers a more relaxed atmosphere and better rehabilitative opportunities.
She began leading yoga classes and found programs that fit her needs and personality. At home in AA meetings, she quickly became a lead facilitator. She joined Responsibly Driven, a group with a specialized curriculum aimed at unraveling the decision-making processes behind substance abuse.
She applied herself to a vocational job assignment in audio-video production training and joined the prison’s newsletter team. Her community leaders brought her onto the Inmate Advisory Council.
But there was still a lot of turmoil inside her head.
Sabrina Limon befriended Coleman when she first arrived. They bonded over their mutual commitment to sobriety and working the 12 steps of AA.
“You could see her anxiety just all over her face and body language,” said Limon. “It just looked like she was searching to find like, ‘What am I supposed to be doing? Where do I go?’ And you could really really see that anxiety on her.”
Incarcerated since 2016, the 46-year old Limon experienced bouts of anxiety and struggled with depression herself but remained leary of seeking mental health services. “There’s a lot of rumors on the yard that, you know, the parole board’s gonna look down on that. There’s like this fear.”
California Institute for Women started an onsite guidance center to make mental health resources more accessible. Individuals can participate in self-help groups led by psychologists or get one-on-one therapy sessions without being classified as patients.
The open-door policy made it easy for Coleman to talk to someone and pursue the right kind of treatment. She soon decided to sign up for patient care. She also became more confident that her sobriety shouldn’t prevent her from taking antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications while under psychiatric supervision.
“Anxiety is a part of like my daily life,” said Coleman. “It’s something that I ignored for a very long time and why I turned to alcoholism and smoking weed in the first place, so I think acknowledging my anxiety today is really important.”
Limon noticed the difference therapy made in Coleman’s life and appreciated her willingness to talk about it honestly. It inspired her to seek her own treatment.
“I’ve seen such a change in Grace as far as her anxiety goes and really working on her mental health one-on-one with a therapist,” said Limon. “I decided I’m gonna go check it out for myself. And sure enough, thanks to Grace, now I have a therapist. It’s wonderful. It’s helping me so much.”
Rehabilitation and parole
Coleman qualifies as a youth offender because she committed her crime at age 22. Under current law, that means she can go before California’s Board of Parole Hearings in 2033.
Her first chance at freedom will depend on what she does and the choices she makes between now and then. The parole board will look to see who she has become.
“Rehabilitation isn’t presented to us on a silver platter or silver bunk beds,” said Coleman. “It’s something that we actively work for.”
Coleman runs laps out on the facility’s main rec yard to clear her head, even on days when the Southern California heat of Chino exceeds 90 degrees. But it’s her yoga mat that she says will always be her best safe space.
One way or another, illicit drugs find their way into the general population of most any prison. Substance abuse and drug trafficking remain obstacles a person focused on rehabilitation must continually stay clear of and navigate around.
Coleman lives in a housing unit where residents choose to abide by a code of integrity. In the unit, participants of the Puppy Program care for and train rescue animals to become service dogs. They are required to maintain a disciplinary-free record and consent to drug testing.
“You see a lot of people who want to start doing better and who want to be in like a better living environment to stay sober,” she said. “They come over here so that they feel like they have a positive support system to get out of the mix.”
Coleman fills her days with meaningful work and interacts with volunteer organizations from the outside. She contributes to University of California’s Sentencing Project as a storytelling participant. Poetic Justice gives her a creative outlet to express her trauma and healing through poetry. ReEvolution brings formerly incarcerated mentors and advocates inside the prison to discuss restorative justice and circles of harm — harm experienced and harm caused.
Barbara Van Sickle, ReEvolution’s executive director, goes into the prison regularly and has spent lots of time with Coleman in group settings.
“I’ve seen her get to a place where she’s living in responsibility, accountability, and remorse, and not feeling that she can move forward,” said Van Sickle. “But I believe she’s working through that with a lot of introspection and is beginning to find her value again.”
Joe Garcia is a California Local News fellow.
This story was produced jointly by CalMatters & CatchLight as part of our mental health initiative.
This story was reported with support from the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.
