By Erica Byfield 
 
 Only Channel 2 Action News was there when a widow hugged the woman who killed her husband. 
 
 
 
 Glen Walker died in November 2011. 
 
 
 
 Police say Tamara Matthews was behind the wheel of an out-of-control minivan that slammed into the Walker family car on Flat Shoals Road in south Fulton County. 
 
 
 
 Walker was driving and his wife, Sandra, and their two kids were in the car. 
 
 
 
 Matthews’ 16-year-old son died in the crash, Sandra Walker suffered a life-altering brain injury and her husband died days later. 
 
 
 
 On Thursday, nearly 2 ½ years after the accident, Matthews entered a plea to misdemeanor counts of homicide by vehicle and failure to maintain l ane. 
 
 
 
 A judge sentenced Matthews to 36 months’ probation and 500 hours of community service. 
 
 
 
 During a victim-impact statement, Sandra Walker shed tears as she told Matthews she forgives her. When the court proceedings ended, Walker hugged Matthews. 
 
 
 
 Channel 2's Erica Byfield spoke to Walker afterwards. 
 
 
 
 "I know she is going through as much pain as I am feeling . I wanted her to know that I forgive her for what she did," Walker said. 
 
 
 
 Earlier, Matthews told the court and the Walker family she was sorry. 
 
 
 
 The judge told Matthews her community service should include acts that honor the lives of her son and Glen Walker. ||||| Sandra Walker was also injured in the head-on crash. The couple’s two children were not injured. (Family photo) 
 
 By Alexis Stevens 
 
 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 
 
 One woman lost her husband in the crash. The other woman caused the crash, which also killed her teenage son. 
 
 But today in court, the two women hugged. 
 
 Tamara Matthews avoided jail time in the crash that killed both Joshua Jenkins, 16, and Glen Walker, 35, in November 2011. She entered a guilty plea today to misdemeanor counts of homicide by vehicle and failure to maintain lane and was sentenced to 36 months’ probation and 500 hours of community service, Channel 2 Action News reported. 
 
 Matthews apologized to Walker’s family in court. And when it was her turn to speak, Walker’s widow, Sandra, said she forgives Matthews. 
 
 “I know she is going through as much pain as I am feeling,” Sandra Walker told Channel 2. “I wanted her to know that I forgive her for what she did.” 
 
 On Nov. 5, 2011, Matthews veered into oncoming traffic on Flat Shoals Road in south Fulton County, near the intersection with Harper Valley Drive, causing the head-on wreck, The AJC previously reported. Eight people were hospitalized after the crash, which killed Joshua Jenkins at the scene. 
 
 Matthews’ van struck a van containing the Walker family of Duluth, which caused the family’s van to flip and land on its roof, police said. 
 
 Glen Walker, 35, who was driving the van, died from injuries weeks after the crash. His wife sustained a traumatic brain injury in the crash and turned 30 while hospitalized. The couple’s two young children were not seriously injured. 
 
 At the time of the crash, the Walkers were on their way to Callaway Gardens, where Sandra Walker was planning to run a 10K race, a family member previously said. Family members aren’t sure why the Walkers had gotten off I-85 and were on Flat Shoals Road, but speculated the family may have planned to stop for a bathroom break. 
 
 Glen Walker was a loyal friend who always smiled and enjoyed playing a variety of sports, such as basketball, flag football and soccer, sister-in-law Michelle Walker said after his death. He attended the University of Georgia after growing up in Norcross. 
 
 The judge told Matthews her community service should include acts that honor the lives of her son and Glen Walker. ||||| The ex-wife of Justin Ross Harris, the Georgia man who was found guilty of intentionally leaving the couple’s 22-month-old son to die in a hot SUV in June 2014, is speaking out for the first time about why she supported her ex-husband through the trial and continues to support him today. 
 
 Interested in Justin Ross Harris? Add Justin Ross Harris as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Justin Ross Harris news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Add Interest 
 
 “It never crossed my mind that Ross had done it on purpose,” Leanna Taylor told ABC's Amy Robach in an exclusive interview. “Never. It was an accident.” 
 
 A Georgia jury made up of six men and six women in November found Harris guilty on eight counts, including malice murder and two counts of felony murder, for the death of their son, Cooper Harris. He was sentenced to life without parole. 
 
 Andrea Mabry/ABC 
 
 The boy was pronounced dead on June 18, 2014, after authorities said he spent about seven hours alone in a rear-facing car seat in Harris’s locked SUV in the Atlanta area. Temperatures in the area had reached the low 90s outside that day. Authorities ruled that Cooper died of hyperthermia. 
 
 Taylor said she first learned something was wrong when she went to Cooper’s daycare that afternoon to pick him up. 
 
 “The day care teacher ... said, ‘Well, Cooper’s not here.’ and I thought she was joking, and I was like, ‘No really, where’s Cooper?’” Taylor said. “And she just looked me dead in the face and got my attention. She was like, ‘He’s not here.’ I didn’t know what to think.” 
 
 Taylor said her first thought was that someone must have taken him from daycare, and then she said she thought, and admits she said out loud, that Harris must have left him in the car. 
 
 “Nothing else that my mind was going to made sense,” she said. “The next place my brain went was, ‘Well, maybe Ross left him at home, like, maybe he just forgot to take him to daycare.’ ... he could be a forgetful person.” 
 
 When a detective told her later that day that her son was dead, Taylor said she felt “numb.” 
 
 Since 1998, an average of 37 U.S. children have died annually from heatstroke after being trapped inside vehicles, according to the Department of Meteorology and Climate Sciences at San Jose State University, which tracks heatstroke deaths of children in vehicles. 
 
 Police say Cooper was in the car when Harris drove to work at a Home Depot corporate office that morning, and when Harris went inside, Cooper was left in the vehicle. Surveillance video showed Harris had returned to his car during lunch to put something away, then went back to work. Later that day, after Harris went back again to his car and drove away from work, then he pulled over in a shopping center parking lot where he asked for help, authorities say. 
 
 Authorities argued that Harris going back to the car at lunch proved he knew Cooper was still there, but Taylor sees it differently. 
 
 “The going back to the car part actually for me solidifies that it wasn’t intentional,” she said. “To me, it said the opposite, that he didn’t have a clue Cooper was there.” 
 
 Detectives zeroed in on Harris, but said they were also suspicious of Taylor because they thought her actions that day seemed strange. She had told daycare workers that “Ross must have left him in the car” and detectives said she seemed unemotional when she was told Cooper was dead. 
 
 Most suspicious, police said, was that while Harris was awaiting questioning at the police station, Taylor was recorded asking him, “Did you say too much?” Later, at Cooper’s funeral, eyewitnesses reported that she seemed unemotional, and that she told people Cooper seemed to be in a better place. 
 
 Taylor, who was never arrested or charged in the case, said she was just trying to process what had happened. 
 
 “Nothing about it felt real. Nothing about it felt like it was happening. It just felt like a bad dream,” Taylor said. “My faith is the only thing that has kept me alive since this happened. The only thing that could give me any kind of peace was knowing that Cooper was in a good place ... People took it as me not wanting him here. 
 
 “If I could bring Cooper back to me, of course I would bring him back,” she added. 
 
 Since the funeral, Taylor said she has been the target of horrific bullying, both in person and online. She said she was barred at first from getting her son’s belongings from his daycare and she said someone left a note on Cooper’s grave saying, “If you had been my son, I would have loved you.” 
 
 “There's no way for someone to know how they would react,” Taylor said. “If somebody had asked me the day before this happened, ‘How would you react if this happened to you?’ My explanation of how I would have reacted and the reality of how I actually reacted would have been completely opposite.” 
 
 Because of pretrial publicity, the proceedings were moved nearly 300 miles away from Atlanta to the coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia. 
 
 At trial, prosecutors argued that Harris had researched child deaths in hot cars before he left Cooper locked in his SUV all day. They also alleged that Harris was leading a “double life,” having multiple online affairs, including with an underage girl, and argued that Harris’ behavior showed he intentionally killed his son to escape the responsibilities of family life. 
 
 “He was living a double life,” assistant district attorney Chuck Boring told “20/20.” “This wasn't just an affair type of thing. It was obsession -- pervasive acts constantly on the internet and meeting up with people ... I think he just was having less and less time with the family to be able to do as much as he wanted and to live the life he wanted.” 
 
 Harris’ defense attorneys argued that Cooper's death was an accident and that Harris forgot his son was in the car. Harris pleaded not guilty to the charges, which included malice murder, two counts of felony murder, cruelty to children in the first degree, cruelty to children in the second degree, criminal attempt to commit a felony and two counts of dissemination of harmful material to minors. 
 
 Some of the charges referred to sexually explicit text exchanges from March 2014 through the day of Cooper's death that, prosecutors said, Harris had with an underage girl. 
 
 Despite the accusations against her ex-husband, Taylor took the stand to testify in his defense. In fact, Taylor said Harris was a very involved father from the moment Cooper was born. 
 
 “This was never about me defending Ross,” she told “20/20.” “When you get on the stand and you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, that’s what you’re supposed to do, and that’s what I did.” 
 
 “I couldn’t get up there and say he was a bad father because it wasn’t true,” Taylor continued. “I couldn’t get up and say that he seemed bothered by having a child because it wasn’t true.” 
 
 On the stand, Taylor testified that she was aware that Harris had sexted with other women, that he suffered from a porn addiction, though she claimed she thought it was under control, and said they went to counseling. 
 
 “It is incredibly disappointing to see somebody go down -- somebody that you loved, somebody that you trusted, and somebody that you believed in go down a road of that kind of destruction,” she told “20/20.” 
 
 Taylor said Harris did apologize to her for what happened and she accepted, but “it’s not going to change anything.” She remains steadfast that Harris never would have killed their son on purpose. 
 
 “There was evidence in our relationship that would suggest that he would be capable of being unfaithful to me,” she said. “There was no evidence in our relationship that suggested that he would harm anyone, much less his own son.” 
 
 Today, her son Cooper has been gone longer than he was alive. Taylor said she slept with his blankets every night for months and it took her two years before she could bring herself to wash his dirty clothes. 
 
 “At this very moment, there is a sippy cup on my kitchen table that still has the water in it that he had drank the day before or the morning of, and I just can’t wash it,” she said. “There’s some of him in it and that may seem weird ... and nobody touches it. It’s like they know better.” 
 
 Taylor got a tattoo of Cooper’s right footprint on her right foot so that she said he will always be “walking with her.” She has a second tattoo, a semicolon on her wrist, which has been used as a symbol of suicide prevention. Taylor said she came very close to committing suicide but in the end decided she didn’t want to put her family through more heartache. 
 
 Her mission now is to spread awareness about “Forgotten Baby Syndrome,” the clinical term for parents accidentally leaving children in cars, to make sure what happened to Cooper serves as a warning to other parents. 
 
 “[Cooper] deserves a better legacy than ‘the boy whose father intended to kill him,’” Taylor said. “People don't believe that it can happen to them, and not believing that it can happen to you is putting your child in danger.”
– A Georgia widow confronted the woman responsible for her husband's death in a fatal car accident in court yesterday—and gave her a hug, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I know she is going through as much pain as I am feeling,” Sandra Walker told WSB-TV of her encounter with Tamara Matthews. "I wanted her to know that I forgive her for what she did." In the 2011 crash, Matthews' van hit the Walker family's van, killing both Walker's 35-year-old husband and Matthews' 16-year-old son. Sandra Walker suffered life-altering brain trauma; her two young children, who were also in the car, escaped serious injury. Matthews pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide and failure to maintain lane, but she avoided jail time at yesterday's sentencing. Walker, who didn't want Matthews to be separated from her remaining children, had wanted it that way, WBTW reports. Instead, the judge gave her 36 months of probation and 500 hours of community service.