A 24-year-old mother in Georgia is likely to spend the rest of her life in prison for killing her 20-month-old son, throwing his body in a dumpster, and lying to police several times about where she was when her son went missing.
Friday, a jury in Chatham County found Leilani Simon guilty of killing young Quinton Simon. She was found guilty of one count of malice murder, two counts of felony murder, one count of concealing the death of another person, and more than a dozen counts of false reporting. After thinking about it for about seven hours, the jury found Simon guilty of all the charges in the indictment.
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The mother of three was charged with killing Quinton on October 5, 2022. She was said to have killed her son on purpose with an unknown object “that when used offensively against a person did result in serious bodily injury” and “caused Quinton’s death.”
Simon is charged with felony murder because it is said that he killed Quinton while also committing felonies of aggravated assault and first-degree cruelty to a child by “maliciously” causing Quinton “cruel and excessive physical pain” in a way that the grand jury did not know about at the time of the indictment.
Judge Tammy Stokes of the Superior Court read all 19 charges to Simon and said “guilty” after each one. Simon did not say a word. The killer who was found guilty got a little emotional and used a tissue to wipe her eyes as the jury left the courtroom.
Stokes said that Simon’s sentencing hearing will happen at a different time.
About six weeks after he first went missing, Quinton’s body was found in a landfill in Savannah, Georgia. An officer from the Chatham County Police Department testified during the eight-day trial. She was moved to tears as she talked about finding a piece of Quinton’s skull in the trash and how awful it was.
During the trial, the prosecutors kept bringing up the strange stories Simon told police who were looking into Quinton’s disappearance. She also talked to police in a number of clips shown.
Simon said in one of these videos that she went to a remote dumpster in the middle of the night, not long after her son went missing, to throw away “spoiled shrimp pasta.”
Prosecutors were especially interested in Simon’s story about why she was at the dumpster in the Azalea Mobile Home Plaza just after 1 a.m. on the morning her son was reported missing.
“The evidence will show that she didn’t want to admit that what she threw away was Quinton’s body,” said Tim Dean, a special assistant district attorney in Savannah. “She explained that what she threw away was stinky shrimp pasta.”
Then he played a recording of the police interview from 2022-10-12.
Simon tells the police officer, “Yeah, I did throw away trash.” “My car smelled like spoiled food, so when I turned around and saw that dumpster, I did stop and throw the trash away.” It went bad.
As spoiled as shrimp pasta. The whole car smelled like shrimp. I asked, “What does that smell like?” I took a look and threw it away. To be honest, I didn’t think much of it—it was just old food.
She also said that she just threw away the trash because she saw “the chance.”
The prosecutors said Simon was actually getting rid of her son’s body, which was later found “in pieces.”
Dean told the jury, “She throws Quinton’s body away like trash around 1:17 in the morning.” “The defendant broke that most basic and sacred trust of a parent in the worst way possible.” She killed her own son in the middle of the night, put his body in her car, drove to a dumpster, and threw him away like trash.
In the indictment, the government said that Simon lied to local and federal investigators looking for Quinton many times after killing her son.
The document says that she “admitted that she had left her home in the late hours of October 4, 2022, to meet her drug dealer, falsely stating that the purpose of this meeting was to pay off an existing drug debt.” Authorities say Simon lied when she said she left her house early on October 5, 2022, to “meet her friend ‘Misty’ to obtain Orajel.” In reality, she went on a trip to dump her son’s body.
According to the indictment, Simon told investigators more than once that she had made false claims about where she was and what she did on the morning of October 5, 2022.
They say she told them on Oct. 31, 2022, that her boyfriend Daniel Youngkin, not she, had left the house on Oct. 5, 2022, in the morning.
The indictment says that Simon lied to police and said, “she did not remember what she had done there,” on Nov. 21, 2022, the same day she was arrested. She allegedly admitted that she did leave her house on the morning of Oct. 5, 2022, and go to the Azalea Mobile Home Plaza.
On November 18, 2022, human remains were found in the landfill. After that, on November 28, the FBI confirmed that the bodies were those of Quinton.
Jennifer Parker, an assistant district attorney for the state, said that Simon didn’t seem like the mother of a missing child.
“Leilani Simon isn’t a mom.” “She’s a nasty person,” the prosecutor said. “This woman did a terrible thing.” “She is a bad person.”
Stokes said that at Simon’s sentencing hearing, she would hear about both circumstances that made the crime worse and circumstances that made it less bad.
