A bond hearing has been set for the Savannah-area mother charged in the beating death of her 20-month-old son whose remains were discovered in a landfill late last year.
Leilani Simon, 22, reported her son, Quinton Simon, missing on Oct. 5. The case made national headlines as state and federal authorities searched extensively for the toddler, and within a week, officials confirmed their belief that the boy was already dead and that his mother was the primary suspect. They eventually zeroed in on a landfill, where they sifted through 1.2 million pounds of trash to find his remains on Nov. 18, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported.
Leilani Simon was arrested three days later and has been behind bars ever since. She faces several charges, including murder, concealing the death of another, false report of a crime and 14 counts of making false statements.
Her attorneys have filed a motion seeking bond for their client. She was initially denied bail, as only a Superior Court judge can set bond in her more serious charges, such as murder. Now that she has been indicted and the case is in Superior Court, a hearing will be held March 23, online court records show.
According to her indictment, Simon beat her son to death with an unknown object and then discarded his body in the dumpster of a mobile home park in early October. She also is accused of lying to investigators, first implying that the toddler had been abducted by an unknown intruder and then lying about her movements leading up to her reporting him missing, the indictment states.
Simon told investigators she visited a friend to pick up an oral topical pain reliever the morning of Oct. 5, according to the indictment. But the location of that meeting changed from a gas station to the mobile home park where she allegedly discarded her son’s body, and at one point, she claimed it was another person who made the trip.
She eventually admitted that she was the one who traveled to the mobile home park and that she never picked up the oral gel or had contact with the friend she claimed to meet, the indictment states. But she told investigators she could not remember what she did at the park.
According to the Savannah Morning News, the toddler and his older sibling were in the custody of their grandmother, Billie Jo Howell, who attempted to evict Simon and her boyfriend from her home in early September.
Authorities have said they don’t anticipate any other arrests in the case.
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