John Jefferson
Main: Leilani Simon after being found guilty of murdering 20-month-old Quinton Simon (Law&Crime). Inset: Quinton Simon (District Attorney’s Office).
A 24-year-old mother in Georgia will likely spend the remainder of her days behind bars for killing her 20-month-old son, tossing his body in a dumpster, and repeatedly misleading police as her whereabouts during the time her son went missing.
A jury in Chatham County on Friday unanimously found Leilani Simon guilty on one count of malice murder, two counts of felony murder, one count of concealing the death of another, and more than a dozen counts of false reporting in the slaying of young Quinton Simon. The jury deliberated for about seven hours before convicting Simon on all counts included in the indictment.
The mother of three was accused of killing Quinton on Oct. 5, 2022, intentionally killing 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.
Simon stood silently as the Superior Court Judge Tammy Stokes read through all 19 charges, declaring “guilty” after each one. The convicted killer became slightly emotional, dabbing tears from her eyes with a tissue as the jury exited the courtroom.
Stokes said Simon’s sentencing hearing will be scheduled for a later date.
Quinton’s remains were discovered in a landfill in Savannah, Georgia, about six weeks after he initially went missing. An officer with the Chatham County Police Department took the stand during the eight-day trial and provided emotional testimony about the moment she came across a piece of Quinton’s skull in the landfill, saying it was “heartbreaking.”
Throughout the trial, prosecutors repeatedly emphasized the bizarre array of stories Simon told police who were investigating Quinton’s disappearance. Several clips were also shown of her interactions with police.
In one such video, 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.”
Prosecutors particularly homed in on 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,” Savannah Special Assistant District Attorney Tim Dean said.
He 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 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.
In closing arguments for the state, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Parker said Simon showed no signs of a mother whose child was missing.
“Leilani Simon is not a mother. She is a monster,” the prosecutor said. “What this woman did is horrific. She is a monster.”
Stokes said that during Simon’s sentencing hearing she would hear evidence of both aggravating and mitigating circumstances.
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