The trial for a 24-year-old woman in Georgia, charged with the murder of her 20-month-old son, commenced on Monday. Prosecutors informed the jury that in the days before the child’s death, the mother faced relationship troubles, was using various narcotic drugs, and subsequently provided police with a series of strange accounts.
During a police interview, Simon mentioned that she pulled over at a quiet dumpster late at night soon after her son went missing to dispose of “spoiled shrimp pasta.”
In December 2022, Leilani Simon was indicted on 19 criminal charges, which include malice murder, felony murder, concealing the death of another, and making false statements to law enforcement regarding the death of young Quinton Simon. Authorities claim that on October 5, 2022, Simon deliberately took her son’s life using an unidentified object that caused significant harm and ultimately led to Quinton’s death.
Simon faces felony murder charges related to the alleged killing of Quinton during the commission of aggravated assault and first-degree cruelty to a child, with claims of causing Quinton severe physical pain in a way that was not disclosed to the grand jury during the indictment process.
During a nearly two-hour opening statement, Tim Dean, the Special Assistant District Attorney from Savannah, Georgia, emphasized Simon’s account of her presence at the isolated Azalea Mobile Home Plaza dumpster shortly after 1 a.m. on the night 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.
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Prosecutors presented a recording of the police interview conducted on October 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 mentioned that she just noticed “the opportunity” and discarded the trash.
Prosecutors stated that Simon was in the process of disposing of her son’s body, which they claim was ultimately found “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.”
Authorities claimed in the indictment that after the death of her son, Simon consistently misled local and federal investigators who were looking 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.
Prosecutors allege that Simon misrepresented her actions on the morning of Oct. 5, 2022, stating she left home to meet a friend named ‘Misty’ for Orajel, while in reality, she went to dispose of her son’s body.
According to the indictment, Simon reiterated the purportedly false statements regarding her location and activities on the morning of October 5, 2022, during multiple follow-up interviews with investigators. On October 31, 2022, she reportedly stated that it was her boyfriend, Daniel Youngkin, who left the house on the morning of October 5, 2022, not her.
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On November 21, 2022, the day of her arrest, Simon reportedly confessed to leaving her home on the morning of October 5, 2022, and going to the Azalea Mobile Home Plaza, but she misleadingly claimed to investigators that she could not recall her actions there, according to the indictment.
On November 18, 2022, human remains were found in the landfill. The FBI later verified that the remains belonged to Quinton on November 28.