John Jefferson
From left to right/ Leilani Simon and Quinton Simon (District Attorney’s Office), and Simon in court (Law&Crime)
The trial of a 24-year-old woman in Georgia accused of killing her 20-month-old son and tossing his body in a dumpster began on Monday with prosecutors telling jurors that in the days leading up to the toddler’s death, the victim’s mother had been having relationship issues, taking a spate of narcotic drugs, and later told police a bizarre array of stories.
At one point during an interview with police, Simon explained that she stopped at a secluded dumpster in the middle of the night shortly after her son’s disappearance because she was throwing away “spoiled shrimp pasta.”
As previously reported, Leilani Simon in December 2022 was indicted on 19 criminal counts, including malice murder, felony murder, concealing the death of another, and making false statements to police in the slaying of young Quinton Simon. Authorities allege that Simon on Oct. 5, 2022, intentionally killed her son with an unknown object “that when used offensively against a person did result in serious bodily injury,” and “cause Quinton’s death.”
The felony murder charges stem from accusations that Simon killed Quinton while also committing felonious acts of aggravated assault and first-degree cruelty to a child by “maliciously” causing Quinton “cruel and excessive physical pain” in a manner that was unknown to the grand jury at the time of the indictment.
In an opening statement that lasted nearly two hours, Savannah, Georgia, Special Assistant District Attorney Tim Dean highlighted Simon’s explanation for being at the remote Azalea Mobile Home Plaza dumpster just after 1 a.m. on the morning her son was reported missing.
“The evidence will show that she did not want to admit that [what she threw away] was Quinton’s body, so she describes this trash that she threw away as stinky shrimp pasta,” Dean said.
Prosecutors then played a tape of the police interview from Oct. 12, 2022.
“Yeah, I did throw away trash,” Simon tells the detective. “There was spoiled food smelling in my car so when I pulled around and seen that (dumpster), yeah, I stopped and threw the trash away. It was spoiled. Spoiled like shrimp pasta. The whole car smelled like shrimp. I was like, what is that smell? I looked, and I threw it away. I didn’t think anything of it to be honest, it’s just old food.”
She added that she simply saw “the opportunity” and threw away the trash.
Prosecutors said that Simon was actually disposing of her son’s body, which they say was eventually recovered “in pieces.”
“She throws Quinton’s body away like a piece of trash about 1:17 in the morning,’ Dean told jurors. ‘The defendant violated that most basic, sacred trust of a parent in the most horrible way. In the middle of the night, she killed him, her own son, got in her car with his body, drove to a dumpster, then threw him away like a piece of trash.”
In the indictment, authorities alleged that after killing her son, Simon repeatedly lied to local and federal investigators searching for Quinton.
She “admitted that she had left her home in the late night hours of October 4, 2022 to meet her drug dealer, falsely stating that the purpose of this meeting was to pay for an existing drug debt,” the document states. According to prosecutors, Simon falsely claimed that in the early morning hours of Oct. 5, 2022, she left her home to “meet her friend ‘Misty’ to obtain Orajel’ when she actually traveled to dump her son’s body.
The indictment states that Simon repeated the allegedly false claims about her whereabouts and actions on the morning of Oct. 5, 2022, in several subsequent interviews with investigators. Then, on Oct. 31, 2022, she allegedly claimed that it was not her, but her boyfriend, Daniel Youngkin, who left the house on the morning of Oct. 5, 2022.
However, on Nov. 21, 2022, the same day she was arrested, Simon allegedly admitted that she did leave her house on the morning of Oct. 5, 2022, and traveled to the Azalea Mobile Home Plaza but falsely told investigators that “she did not remember what she had done there,” per the indictment.
Human remains were discovered in the landfill on Nov. 18, 2022. The FBI subsequently confirmed that the remains were Quinton on Nov. 28.
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