A mother accused of killing her 20-month-old son allegedly told cops she disposed of ‘stinky shrimp pasta’ – when it was believed to be the remains of her toddler.
The grisly details emerged on the first day of Leilani Simon’s trial in the death of her son Quinton, who disappearance in early October 2022 promoted a national search.
Prosecutors on Monday played a recording of an interview Simon, 24, had with police days after her son vanished.
‘Yeah, I did throw away trash,’ Simon told a detective, according to Law&Crime.
‘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.’
Simon said she saw ‘the opportunity’ to dispose of the ‘pasta’ at the Azalea Mobile Home Plaza dumpster shortly after 1am the morning that Quinton was reported missing.
Special Assistant District Attorney Tim Dean in his opening statement said the evidence would show that Simon refused to admit the contents were her son’s remains, ‘so she describes this trash that she threw away as stinky shrimp pasta’.
‘The defendant violated that most basic, sacred trust of a parent in the most horrible way,’ the prosecutor told jurors in Georgia.
‘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.’
Investigators eventually found Quinton’s remains ‘in pieces’ in a landfill in mid-November 2022, and the FBI identified his remains later that month.
Simon was indicted on 10 criminal counts including malice murder, felony murder, making false statements to police and concealing the death of another.
Her trial is expected to run several weeks.
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