CHATHAM COUNTY, Ga. (Court TV) — A Georgia mother is facing life in prison after a jury found her guilty of murdering her toddler son whose remains were found in a landfill.
Leilani Simon in court on October 14, 2024. (Court TV)
The jury convicted Leilani Simon on 19 charges, including murder, concealing a death, falsely reporting a crime and 14 counts of lying to investigators.
On Oct. 5, 2022, Leilani called the police to report that Quinton Simon was missing. She told a 911 dispatcher that their front door was open and Quinton must have been abducted. For weeks, investigators searched for the boy. His remains were discovered Nov. 18.
Prosecutors argued Leilani killed Quinton on the morning of Oct. 5 by assaulting him with an unknown object before leaving his body in a dumpster outside of a trailer park near her home.
In the days and weeks after reporting her son’s disappearance, Leilani gave a number of interviews to the police and FBI, which her attorneys have fought to keep from being entered into evidence at trial.
Leilani’s sentencing was not immediately scheduled. The judge indicated she would hear both aggravating and mitigating evidence at a hearing before delivering the sentence.
DAILY TRIAL UPDATES
DAY 10 – 10/25/24
- The jury returned guilty verdicts on all 19 charges.
DAY 9 – 10/24/24
- Special Assistant District Attorney Tim Dean gave the first of the State’s closing argument outlining the circumstances of October 4th, 2022, that ultimately led to the death of 20-month-old Quinton Simon.
- Dean delivered a 1.5-hour closing argument. The prosecutor said Leilani Simon murdered her son, Quinton, then unlawfully concealed his body when she threw him away in a dumpster.
- Dean said Leilani Simon craved male attention the way most people crave oxygen. He suggested that October 4, was a tough day for Simon who was being rejected by her boyfriend Danny Youngkin and feeling bad about herself. On that day she also had a wisdom tooth pulled and was in pain. GPS data suggested she went to Arkwright Road to see her lover and drug dealer whom she had been hooking up with in the days leading up to Quinton’s death. When he wasn’t there, she left not having gotten the male attention she so craved, instead purchased Percocet and cocaine from Craig’s cousin Tim Weston.
- “Under those circumstances, for reasons known only to her she does the unspeakable. Judge will tell you we don’t have to prove motive. It’s hard to figure out why people do things,” said Tim Dean (10:28)
- The drugs she did that night exacerbated her foul mood and she killed the son she hated, disposed of his body in a dumpster where she expected he should never be found.
- For two minutes she sits at the dumpster. You don’t need two minutes to throw away old food. She’s thinking about whether she’s going to do this. Once you put him in there, there’s no going back. Waste Pro truck is coming. Two minutes to think about whether she throws her son in the garbage to be crushed by the compactor and ground up at the landfill (1:33)
- Defense Attorney Martin Hilliard argued that the government had not proven its case against his client, noting that prosecutors could not explain how, when, or where Quinton died. Furthermore, Hilliard accused investigators of ignoring inconsistencies in Youngkin’s timeline because it did not fit with the State’s theory of the case.
- “State’s strategy is to tell you, Miss Simon was a slut, party girl, horrible mother, all of these things could be true – none of these things have anything to do with the central question, they haven’t answered this question with evidence,” Hilliard argued. “How did Quinton Simon die, where, and in what manner did he die.” (12:07)
- Hilliard suggested the State overlooked Youngkin as a potential suspect, noting that he left town shortly after Quinton’s disappearance and was quick to participate in law enforcement’s surveillance operation to gather evidence against Simon. He recalled that despite the hours of interrogation and wire taps, Simon never admitted that she harmed her child.
- Jennifer Parker gave the State’s rebuttal argument and questioned Simon’s behavior and said it was not consistent with that of a caring mother.
- “She wasn’t looking for Quinton. There is no mother who wouldn’t be looking for their child. (13:01) She waited for Danny to come home. That is not normal. Her lying is not normal. She wasn’t a worried mother she was a murderer trying to hide.”
- Parker closed by telling jurors that “Leilani Simon is not a mother. She is a monster.” 13:07 “What this woman did is horrific. She is a monster. We can’t undo the horror of what she did. We cannot give him the 80 years – we can’t give him back – we can’t do that. What we can do is give him justice. You can give him the justice he deserves and give her the justice she deserves.
DAY 8 – 10/23/24
- Leilani Simon takes the witness stand and tells the judge she will not testify in her own defense.
- The defense rests without putting on any evidence.
- The defense moves for a judgment of acquittal on the murder charges, arguing that the Medical Examiner could not determine cause and manner of death – motion denied.
- State rested its case after calling 36 witnesses in its case-in-chief, its final witness the medical examiner testified she could not autopsy Quinton as all she had were bones.
- An FBI Forensic toxicologist examined brain tissue from Quinton’s skull and found no evidence of cocaine or its metabolites.
- An FBI DNA Analyst compared Quinton’s remains to the DNA profiles of Leilani Simon and ex-boyfriend Henry Bubba Moss Jr. and testified to a degree of statistical certainty that they were his parents.
- WATCH: DNA Confirms Remains Found at Landfill Were Quinton Simon
- WATCH: Text Messages Read Between Simon and her Drug Dealer and Lover
DAY 7 – 10/22/24
- In the days before Quinton was killed, prosecutors say the defendant was sneaking out of the house for sexual liaisons with Craig Weston, her drug dealer and lying to police about the true nature of their relationship.
- She initially told police that she left the house twice during the night of October 4, once to meet ‘Red’ to pay a drug debt. The details of that meeting evolved during another police interview in which she revealed that Red and Craig were the same person, and she met him that night to buy cocaine and Percocet.
- Prosecutors introduced text exchanges between the defendant and Weston to demonstrate that the two were meeting up for sex in the days leading up to Quinton’s disappearance.
- On October 1, the following text exchange took place between Simon and Weston at 3:23 AM after they spent about an hour and half together.
- CW: That was good as f*** I’ll take that anytime. FRI, I know I made you come for a long time.
LS: I would be down to do that again anytime
LS And yes you did for a good ass minute
- CW: That was good as f*** I’ll take that anytime. FRI, I know I made you come for a long time.
- On October 1, the following text exchange took place between Simon and Weston at 3:23 AM after they spent about an hour and half together.
- Simon denied there was anything between them when police asked her about the nature of their relationship.
- The judge barred any video and audio recording of Craig Weston when he testified that he had not met Simon on October 4th and was not at Arkwright Road that night– a reference to where he allegedly sold drugs.
- The better part of the day was spent on testimony surrounding the tracing of Quinton’s remains from dumpster to landfill.
- A police officer who participated in the landfill search for Quinton’s remains testified she spent five weeks sifting through trash and on what would have been the last day of the search – she recovered the victim’s skull. When asked about the find, she said it was ‘heartbreaking’ and broke down in tears.
- Joe Matz of Waste Pro identified the truck that serviced Azalea Mobile Home Park, and said after the driver took the trash, he drove to the landfill to unload.
- A manager at the landfill determined where the driver would unload. Bulldozers at the landfill would normally compact and pulverize the trash but he redirected the operation to another part of the landfill to allow heavy equipment operators to dig through the suspected Azalea trash pile, and move it to a clearing deck to be combed through for Quinton’s remains.
DAY 6 – 10/21/24
- An FBI agent who participated in interviewing Leilani Simon over several days said she changed her story about being at the Azalea Mobile Home Park the third time she was interviewed about her missing son.
- She originally told detectives she had gone to the Mobile Home Park area to meet Melissa ‘Misty’ Bray a former coworker to get Orajel in the early morning hours of October 5th, 2022
- On October 12th when agents interviewed Simon again and told her they had talked to Bray and could not corroborate her Orajel story – she said she stopped at the Azalea Mobile Home Park to dump trash that was smelling up her car.
- Special Agent Snider noted during the hours long interview (75 min was played for the jury) she was asked about how she got rid of the trash – she described using one hand to retrieve the trash bag from her trunk but demonstrated using both hands and raised arms to show how she unloaded the bag into the dumpster.
- WATCH: Special Agent Testifies to Leilani Simon’s Changing Stories
- Snider thought it odd Simon smelled the trash before unloading it, when he asked her about it, she said the bag was only partially tied.
- At one point during the interview, Simon broke down crying, saying she did not know what happened to Quinton and could not remember harming him, but if she did, she would take responsibility.
- Special Agent Savannah Solomon said October 12 was the day they notified family members of Quinton’s death and that they would begin the search for him in the landfill. She said the defendant did not appear shocked, while four other family members, including the defendant’s mother, reacted with anguish and shock.
- Simon also disclosed to her that cocaine made her angry and impulsive and that she could feel her personality changing when she was high.
- The defendant gave a teary interview to a local TV station on October 24th. She appealed to the public for help, ‘we want answers just like everyone else does.’
- Special Agent Solomon said Simon texted her on the 24th – essentially blaming Danny for making her tell the Orajel story and blaming him for Quinton’s disappearance.
- Solomon testified that the defendant described she wanted to an ‘in memoriam’ type of tattoo dedicated to Quinton.
- On cross by defense attorney Martin Hilliard – he noted that despite the FBI’s best efforts to surveil Simon with the cooperation of her boyfriend at the hotel and to wiretap their conversations over 60 days – Simon never made any admission that she harmed her child.
DAY 5 – 10/18/24
- Michelle McCarta, the defendant’s babysitter testified that she thought Leilani Simon was a ‘crappy mother,’ who favored the older of her two boys and it reflected in the way she treated them.
- WATCH: Quinton Simon’s Babysitter Testifies Leilani Was a Bad Mother
- McCarta, who had been babysitting the defendant’s children since 2021/2022, testified that when Simon returned with food from Bojangles, where she worked, she would feed Zayne first and let Quinton whine and fuss before she eventually fed him.
- McCarta said Quinton reacted differently when Simon picked up the boys; Quinton would cry, while if Youngkin, Simon’s boyfriend, picked him up, he was receptive.
- McCarta recalled Youngkin reached out to her the morning of October 5, to ask if Quinton was with her. When she learned that he was missing, she went to Simon’s home and suggested they call the police. Simon did not appear to be looking for her son.
- WATCH: Leilani Simon Grilled by FBI: Police Interogation
- Surveillance video gathered from a neighboring business captures what police say is a vehicle resembling Simon’s car driving into Azalea Mobile Home Plaza at 1:17 AM and stopping around the dumpsters for about two minutes before exiting the park and onto Buckhalter Road which would eventually lead to Simon’s home.
- Data extracted from Simon’s cell phone suggest her phone traveled to Azalea Mobile Home Park and back to Buckhalter Road. it was plugged in at 1:13 AM and unplugged at 1:26. Prosecutors suggest this would be consistent with her plugging her phone into her car for the period in which she drove to Azalea Mobile Park and back home. Data also shows her phone was stationery for a few minutes within the 1:13 to 1:26 AM window.
DAY 4 – 10/17/24
- Melanie Bowling, a former neighbor of the defendant testified that Leilani Simon resented Quinton, verbally abused him, and told her more than once she wished she had aborted him.
- Bowling’s testimony took a bizarre turn when she claimed she had communicated with Quinton’s ghost and she volunteered to channel the toddler in the courtroom with a bible and a candle.
- Bowling told jurors on the cross that Quinton spoke to her during a séance, and told her that ‘Mama hurt him.’ When she asked him how, he told her “She hit me in the head really heard.”
- Prosecutors have told jurors that they were not able to determine how Simon allegedly killed her son. An anthropologist testified previously that remains consistent with a child between the age of one and two were recovered from a local landfill, but she could not determine when the trauma occurred.
- Talea McCarta, a teen who babysat for Simon, said she witnessed the defendant push Quinton into a pool before she could put floaties on him and, on another occasion, saw her backhand him across the face. McCarta testified that the slap knocked the toddler off his feet, prompted him to cry and point to her house across the street.
- McCarta claimed Leilani left Quinton at her house for weeks without checking on him and Simon told her that she did not love Quinton and often disparaged him when comparing him to her older son Zayne.
- Paul Simon the defendant’s brother testified that when he got home at about 10:50 PM the night of October 4th, all the children were fine and didn’t interact with Leilani until the next day when he learned that Quinton was missing.
- He testified that Quinton was an ‘angel’ who was playful and cooperated with diaper changes. He said Danny, who he had known for just a few months often complained about having to take care of the kids.
- Paul testified that the morning Quinton disappeared, Youngkin appeared unfazed while his sister was ‘a mess.’ It didn’t sit right with him that Youngkin left for North Carolina, three days after Quinton’s disappearance.
- Youngkin admitted routinely drank and did drugs. During his cross-examination, the defense suggested he could not have been as attentive a parent as he claimed to be if he was intoxicated and high every day after work. They confronted him with text messages in which he appeared cross with Leilani for not returning home quick enough with drugs and was irritated if Leilani did not share the drugs she purchased.
- Leilani Simon’s former coworker, Melissa “Missy” Bray, testifies she did not meet nor give Leilani Orajel the night Quinton went missing.
DAY 3 – 10/16/24
- Leilani Simon’s ex-boyfriend, Daniel Youngkin took the witness stand and revealed that he agreed to let the FBI wire a hotel room with camera and mics so they could listen in on his conversations with Simon in the days following the disappearance of her son.
- Prosecutors played several clips from their surveillance of Youngkin and Simon, during which Youngkin pressed Simon about going to get Orajel in the middle of the night prompting her to become defensive and combative.
- Youngkin was living with Simon, their infant daughter Skye, and Leilani’s two other children, Quinton and Zayne, when Quinton disappeared. He testified that there was ‘nothing left’ in the relationship with Simon and that he was only staying for Skye.
- Text messages Simon sent to Youngkin reflect how distraught she was over their broken relationship. She lamented the lack of intimacy and affection he had for her, so much so that she contemplated suicide. Jurors viewed a video she made addressing Youngkin, in which she apologized to her children for failing them and pleaded with him to ‘take care of her kids,’ because ‘he couldn’t take care of her and didn’t love her right.’
- In two recorded interviews with police on October 5, and 8, Simon maintained she left briefly during the night to meet ‘Red’ a drug dealer to make a $20 payment for weed and left the house a second time after 1:00 AM to get Orajel from a former co-worker. She denied that she had anything to do with her son’s disappearance and when detectives confronted her with inconsistencies, she became hysterical.
- Simon permitted her phone to be examined by police, and when she was asked about ‘Craig’ or ‘Red’, the drug dealer, she denied there was anything going on between them. However, text exchanges reveal she was having sex with Craig. “Is it common for a mother to have resentment or even anger towards her child because of the father or another reason?”
- The defense successfully argued the salacious texts between Simon and her drug dealer were prejudicial and succeeded in keeping them from being read into evidence.
- A few days before Quinton disappeared, Leilani Simon searched, “Is it common for a mother to have resentment or even anger towards her child because of the father or another reason.”
- The day before Quinton was killed, Simon sent her boyfriend a text expressing her resentment that he hid her phone from her and accused him of cheating on her. Youngkin admitted he kept his phone under his pillow because he disliked Simon going through his devices.
DAY 2 – 10/15/24
- Leilani Simon did not tell police during the search for her missing child, that she left in the middle of the night to buy drugs after a fight with her boyfriend.
- Asked to provide a written statement with as much detail as possible about when she last saw Quinton and the events leading up to discovering her child missing, she again left out the midnight jaunt to buy drugs.
- Simon initially told investigators that she put Quinton to bed at about 10:30 PM and woke up the next morning at 9:00 AM to find the door ajar and her son gone.
- When confronted with information gathered by detectives that her car was photographed around a mobile home park, she pivoted to explain that she called up a friend in the vicinity to obtain Orajel to soothe her discomfort after getting her wisdom tooth pulled.
- When she was pressed about the possibility of an accident, Simon became hysterical and insisted someone had taken her child. When police informed her that her home security system indicated that her door was not open until 9:20 AM, she claimed the system could not be working properly.
- At one point while she was hysterically crying over her missing child, she used the past tense to refer to her son, “He was warm, his cheeks were pink. Please don’t do that. I can’t live with that. He was alive last time I seen my baby; he was my happy baby. He was my happy baby.”
DAY 1 – 10/14/24
- Prosecutor Tim Dean in his lengthy opening told jurors that Quinton Simon, 20-months-old, was betrayed by his mother, who killed him in the early morning hours of October 5th and drove his body to a dumpster where she “threw him away like trash.”
- A few months before his murder, Dean said Simon was feeling unloved and neglected. She made a 4-minute suicide video addressed to her boyfriend Daniel Youngkin, during which she lamented their lost love, and complained that her feelings for him were not being reciprocated.
- WATCH: Jury Sees Leilani Simon’s ‘Suicide Video’ During Opening Statements
- “I don’t hear love in your voice, or the love in your touch, I don’t see the love in your eyes anymore,” she said tearfully. “When I was carrying your child, you didn’t want to have sex with me, you didn’t want me. That feeling was only one way. That love, that loyalty all one way.”
- She ended the video with a plea to him, “to take care of her kids.” She ended the video after she after she arrived at the river, apparently with the intent to kill herself by driving into the river.
- The prosecutor’s lengthy opening included details of Simon’s evolving story over the weeks since her son’s disappearance. In several statements to police, prosecutors say Simon was not truthful with police and did not tell them she made a late-night trip to by cocaine, which was then followed by a trip to the dumpster, where she abandoned her son’s body.
- The night of October 4th, 2022, prosecutors contend Simon had a fight with Daniel Youngkin her boyfriend, and left the house to buy drugs, she did not disclose this late-night jaunt when she was interviewed by police.
- Prosecutors contend the cocaine made her angry and impulsive and precipitated Quinton’s murder. Surveillance video shows her parked outside a dumpster the following morning after 1:00 am.
- Dean conceded that he would not be able to tell jurors how Quinton died. But Dean contends she made a telling admission In her last statement to police. Leilani Simon appeared to break down and tearfully state, “I don’t know if I did something to him, if I did I will take responsibility.”
- The Defense made a very brief opening statement suggesting that the prosecutors were making bold conclusions that they would not be able to prove.
