Grace Coleman thinks about the crime she committed almost constantly. Driving drunk and killing two people forced her to confront a version of herself she never wanted to face. In the years since that night in late 2020, she has tried to build a life around accountability, recovery and mental wellness — even from inside a California prison cell.
“It’s not just that I wake up in prison every day and that reminds me of the harm I caused,” she said. “It’s about how I choose to live my life. It’s about being in Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s about being part of these programs for impaired drivers. Sharing my story in those spaces is what keeps me sober.”
Her story is not an easy one to tell.
On Dec. 8, 2020, Coleman ran a red light and crashed into a car carrying a family of five. Gabriela Andrade and Henry Saldana-Mejia were killed. Their three young daughters, buckled into the back seat, survived with injuries.
Drunk-driving deaths leave behind grieving families and unanswered questions. Without any intent to hurt anyone, offenders like Coleman are often left trying to reconcile who they are with what they’ve done.
More than 1,300 people die each year in California in alcohol-related crashes, though it’s difficult to track exactly how many drivers are prosecuted and convicted for causing those deaths, since homicide statutes don’t always distinguish whether alcohol was involved.
Coleman is serving her sentence at a moment when California’s approach to rehabilitation is shifting. Gov. Gavin Newsom has pushed reforms aimed at preparing incarcerated people for parole and successful reentry into society. Decades of tough-on-crime policy and mass incarceration are slowly giving way to trauma-informed programming and expanded opportunities for those willing to examine why they made the choices that led them to prison.
It’s a difficult road, and many offenders never fully walk it. Some take years, even decades, to come to terms with what happened. Others never do. Coleman began working on herself almost immediately.
“At first I thought, okay, I need therapy,” she said. “I need to take care of my mental health. Clearly something is wrong with me if I wake up and find out I’ve killed people. That doesn’t just happen.”
While awaiting trial at the Orange County Jail, Coleman met face-to-face with surviving relatives of Andrade and Saldana-Mejia — a rare opportunity for a defendant, especially before sentencing. Her defense attorney, the judge, the prosecutor and the family’s attorney all helped arrange the meeting. Coleman listened to their grief, absorbed their loss and answered their questions through tears.
“As a daughter, an only child, I knew what it felt like to have my parents mean everything to me,” she said. “And I just couldn’t stand the thought of having 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 sentence of 21 years to life.
“For me, it really started that day,” she said. “Any denial I was still holding onto disappeared. Any selfishness I still had — worrying about myself and what was going to happen to me — stopped mattering so much.”
“But at the same time, it also brought a sense of hope, as opposed to all that crushing hopelessness.”
Attorney Jeff Roberts represented the victims’ family and remembers Coleman from that private 2022 meeting. He also questioned her during depositions in a related wrongful-death lawsuit. “I got to know Grace a little bit, and I know she has her own story too,” Roberts said. “She had a pretty rough situation, even though she came across as a privileged young woman.”
Roberts said he hopes Coleman leaves prison ready to keep sharing her story and helping others avoid drunk driving and substance abuse. He was surprised to learn her sentence doesn’t come with a fixed release date.
“Grace deserved a substantial sentence,” Roberts said. “But I don’t think it should be a life sentence, because frankly, killing two people and orphaning three kids is already a life sentence. Emotionally, she’ll never get over it.”
## Mental Health Behind Bars
Coleman’s grim reality began in a hospital bed after the crash. She woke up disoriented, sedated and in pain, her left arm in a sling and her right wrist handcuffed to the bed rail.
A nurse, working with limited information, delivered the devastating news while a police officer stood by silently.
“I didn’t know what had happened, who I had killed, or even how I ended up in my car that night,” Coleman said. “Because the last thing I remember, I wasn’t anywhere near my car. So I had a lot of questions.”
Within days she was moved to a medical unit inside the jail. COVID-19 restrictions had shut down visitation almost entirely, and information trickled in slowly. It took weeks for Coleman to piece together what had actually happened.
Her boyfriend at the time had dropped her off at home just before the crash. A day fueled by alcohol, drugs and a toxic relationship should have ended there, with him leaving her stumbling toward her front door, keys in hand. Instead, in a blackout, she got into her Range Rover and drove off.
Once in jail, she began seeing a private mental health specialist who was allowed in despite pandemic restrictions. Coleman said she’d always believed in the value of therapy, but this was the first time she truly gave herself over to it.
“I describe it as an identity crisis, because you’re stripping away layer after layer of yourself and going through this massive transition,” Coleman said.
Weekly therapy sessions, combined with the clarity of newfound sobriety, helped Coleman dig into the roots of her substance abuse. She began to understand how a deep lack of self-worth fed her codependency and her compulsive need to please others. For years, she had been the girl who always said yes — who genuinely wanted to say yes to everything.
“The crime never would have happened without severe alcoholism, and going back to the reasons why I drank, or how I ended up in those states,” she said.
Coleman, a 22-year-old white woman from Laguna Beach, worried how other incarcerated women would react to her background and privilege. Her case had made local television headlines, and word traveled fast. To get by, she needed to connect with the people around her — to show humility rather than entitlement.
She leaned on her faith in God to manage the anxiety and stress she had once numbed with alcohol, marijuana and Xanax. The jail offered few formal rehabilitation programs, so Coleman found her own ways to stay motivated.
“There was no way I could keep going without building some kind of spiritual foundation — something that gave me a reason to live,” she said.
She organized Christian fellowship groups and recovery circles with other women in custody. She found community in cooking and sharing meals. She exercised relentlessly and carved out space in cramped cells to meditate and practice yoga.
Friends from high school and college who came to visit were struck by how healthy she looked. Their last memories of her before jail were of someone constantly high or drunk. They were relieved to see the clear-eyed person they always knew she could be.
“I had to leave that party version of myself behind,” she said. “It was hard, honestly, because I felt like being fun and outgoing was part of my identity. But I realized I could still be that person without being, you know, the friend who blacks out drunk.”
## Adjusting to Life in Prison
The plea deal reflected Coleman’s determination to move forward. She knew little about the prison system at the time, but during her 18 months in county custody, she learned that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation offered more structured programming and educational opportunities than jail did.
When Coleman arrived at her first prison in the fall of 2022, other women serving time for drunk-driving offenses welcomed her into support groups. Hearing stories similar to her own helped her realize she didn’t have to carry the weight of guilt and shame alone.
She also found healing in telling her own story to others. She became deeply involved with Alcoholics Anonymous and discovered FADD — Felons Against Distracted and Drunk Driving.
Still, consistent mental health care proved harder to come by once she entered the prison system. Coleman kept up some phone sessions with her private therapist, but they never matched the depth of in-person conversations. Relying on the prison’s own mental health services meant being randomly assigned psychiatrists and psychologists, each with different approaches and priorities.
Inside prison, seeking mental health treatment carried its own risks — stigma and judgment from other inmates. Therapy or medication could be seen as a sign of weakness. Many worried how a psychiatric diagnosis might affect their chances before the parole board.
“I come from a generation that strongly believes in mental health and therapy as something positive and healthy,” Coleman said. “So walking into the prison system and running into all this stigma, and the fear that comes with it, was a real culture shock.”
She found herself at a crossroads as she adjusted to the realities of long-term incarceration. Many young offenders in her position might have slipped into the same patterns that landed them in prison — fighting, chaos, contraband, drugs.
Coleman chose a different path. Her focus on self-improvement and rehabilitation connected her with women twice or three times her age who had spent decades behind bars.
“Everyone around me is older,” she said. “I’m always the youngest, usually by about 20 years.”
She watched parole hearings come and go without guaranteeing anyone’s release. She saw the toll that aging in prison takes. It made her reckon with her own uncertain future.
“I look at the older women here, especially the ones doing the same work I’m doing,” she said. “Because one day, that could be me, or I could be them. With a life sentence, I know there’s no guarantee I’ll ever go home.”
## Navigating Treatment Decisions
Because staying sober is central to her recovery, Coleman initially worried that antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication might set her back. She turned down prescriptions offered by prison psychiatrists.
Exercise, yoga and support groups remained her primary tools for staying grounded, along with her faith.
In October 2023, Coleman was transferred to the lower-security California Institution for Women in Chino, which offered a calmer environment and stronger rehabilitative programming.
She began teaching yoga and found programs suited to her needs. She quickly became a lead facilitator in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and joined Responsibly Driven, a specialized program aimed at helping people understand the decision-making patterns behind substance abuse.
She pursued vocational training in video production and joined the prison newsletter staff. Community leaders eventually brought her onto the Inmate Advisory Council.
But internally, she still struggled.
Sabrina Limon befriended Coleman soon after she arrived, the two bonding over their shared commitment to sobriety and working the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
“You could see the anxiety in her face and body language,” Limon said. “It seemed like she was searching for something, asking herself, ‘What am I supposed to do? Where do I go?’ That anxiety was very visible.”
Limon, 46, has been incarcerated since 2016 and has dealt with her own anxiety and depression, but for years avoided seeking psychological help. “There’s a lot of talk in prison that the parole board will hold it against you. That fear is real.”
The California Institution for Women eventually opened a counseling center on-site, making mental health resources easier to access. Inmates can join therapist-led support groups or receive individual counseling without being formally classified as psychiatric patients.
That open-door approach made it easier for Coleman to talk to someone and find the right kind of treatment. She eventually enrolled in the facility’s psychiatric care program and came to accept that her sobriety didn’t have to exclude prescribed medication for anxiety and depression, taken under a psychiatrist’s supervision.
“Anxiety is part of my daily life,” Coleman said. “It’s something I ignored for a long time, and that’s part of why I turned to alcohol and marijuana. So acknowledging my anxiety today really matters.”
Limon noticed the shift therapy brought to Coleman’s life and was moved by her openness about it — enough to seek her own treatment.
“I’ve seen a real change in Grace when it comes to her anxiety and mental health because of her individual work with a therapist,” Limon said. “I decided to check it out for myself. And sure enough, thanks to Grace, I now have a therapist. It’s wonderful. It’s helping me so much.”
## Rehabilitation and the Road to Parole
Because she was 22 when she committed her crime, Coleman qualifies as a youth offender under California law, which means she’ll be eligible for a parole hearing in 2033.
Her first shot at release will hinge on what she does — and who she becomes — between now and then.
“Rehabilitation isn’t handed to us on a silver platter,” Coleman said. “It’s something we actively have to work for.”
She runs laps around the facility’s main yard to clear her head, even on days when the Inland Empire heat climbs past 90 degrees. But her yoga mat, she says, remains her true refuge.
Illicit drugs find their way into nearly every prison population one way or another, and substance abuse remains a constant temptation for anyone serious about rehabilitation.
Coleman lives in a housing unit where residents commit to a code of accountability. Within that unit, participants in the Prison Pup Program care for and train rescue dogs to become service animals — a privilege that requires a clean record and regular drug testing.
“You see a lot of people who want to start doing better and are looking for a better environment to stay sober in,” she said. “They come here hoping to find a positive support system that helps them get out of that cycle.”
Coleman fills her days with purposeful work and outside partnerships. She serves as a storyteller for the UC Sentencing Project. Poetic Justice gives her a creative outlet to process trauma and healing through writing. And ReEvolution brings together formerly incarcerated mentors and advocates to lead discussions on restorative justice — examining both the harm people have suffered and the harm they’ve caused.
Barbara Van Sickle, executive director of ReEvolution, visits the prison regularly and has spent considerable time with Coleman in group sessions.
“I’ve watched her reach a place where she lives with responsibility, accountability and remorse, to the point where it feels almost too heavy to carry,” Van Sickle said. “But I think she’s working through it with a lot of self-reflection, and she’s starting to rediscover her own worth.”
This story was produced in partnership with CalMatters and CatchLight as part of a mental health reporting initiative, supported by the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.
Original source: CalMatters
