Antwan Hope Jr. spent the last few days of his short life alone with his mother, going to the park and the library before he was supposed to go back home to the relative who had become his legal guardian.
On June 9, 2013, the boy’s mother, Destene Simmons, fed him fettuccine alfredo for dinner, bathed him, dressed him in his pajamas and played a movie for him before bed, according to a warrant for Simmons’s arrest. The 4-year-old boy was dead by the next morning.
More than 11 years later, Simmons, 34, has been arrested on one count of first-degree murder and one count of aggravated child abuse in her son’s death, Coral Springs Police announced Monday.
Antwan’s name is redacted in the arrest warrant, but the police department publicly identified him and he is identified in other court documents related to his death.
The arrest came after information about Antwan’s death and Simmons’s documented mental health and behavioral issues were revealed in civil court records and after a private medical examiner determined Antwan was suffocated to death, despite the initial medical examiner in 2013 ruling his cause and manner of death were undetermined, according to the warrant.
Antwan’s father, Antwan Hope Sr., years ago argued in court that Simmons, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and depression, never should have been allowed to be alone with their son that weekend. Simmons had a pending case with the Florida Department of Children and Families for the boy’s custody, and Hope Sr. alleged in the lawsuit that DCF was aware of her “significant mental health issues” and that she was a threat to her son.
Simmons was booked Friday into the North Broward Bureau. Port St. Lucie Police Department helped with the arrest, though Coral Springs Police did not say when she was initially arrested.
‘The system has failed you’
Simmons was in the midst of being investigated by DCF in 2013 when her son was found dead in her apartment.
Antwan had been put in the custody of DCF contractor ChildNet two years earlier, after Simmons allegedly attempted to suffocate Antwan with a pillow, according to the 2014 lawsuit Hope Sr. filed against ChildNet and DCF. The boy then went to live with a relative in March 2012, according to the arrest warrant.
Simmons started having unsupervised overnight visits with Antwan three weeks before his death, one of Simmons’s relatives told police, the warrant said. DCF personnel had a home visit with her and her son three days before his death, but Simmons did not tell them she was going to be evicted in the coming days. She was at risk of losing custody of Antwan permanently.
While DCF investigated what the best housing option for Antwan was, the agency became aware of Simmons’s mental health problems, yet allowed Simmons unsupervised visits anyway, according to the 2014 lawsuit. The lawsuit alleged the state agencies were aware that Simmons “would regularly take Antwan Hope Jr. from his residence and walk around in the streets with him at 3 a.m.,” refused others to interact with him, was consistently erratic and had been involuntarily admitted to a hospital at least twice under the Baker Act, among other instances.
Negligence lawsuit filed in boy’s death in Coral Springs
Simmons had been reported multiple times to the Broward Sheriff’s Office and DCF before Antwan’s death, according to the warrant, including in June 2011 when Simmons’s mother reported to BSO that she heard Antwan crying out, “Mommy, stop!” when he was in a bedroom with her. The grandmother opened the door to see Simmons holding a pillow over his face. She was admitted to the hospital under the Baker Act after that incident.
Then-Broward Judge Elizabeth Scherer lambasted the child protection agencies in court a few days after Antwan’s death and said that a court order was violated in allowing Simmons to visit her son unsupervised. Scherer was supposed to review a home study before Simmons could have unsupervised visits, which was not filed until the day after Antwan died.
“The system has failed you, and I’m sorry,” Scherer told Hope Sr. and his relatives in court at the time.
Mother called 911
In three cryptic 911 calls the morning of June 10, 2013, Simmons asked for help without giving her address and without saying why she was calling.
“I just want someone to come out,” Simmons told a 911 operator. In a later call, Simmons gave her address in the 9000 block of Northwest 28th Drive in Coral Springs, saying only, “My baby don’t want to come out,” before hanging up.
After some confusion about Simmons’s address, officers arrived and met her outside, according to the warrant. Asked why she called 911, Simmons, “with no apparent sense of urgency,” said she wanted them to check on her 4-year-old son “to make sure.”
Officers discovered Antwan’s body on a bed, still in his pajamas, inside the apartment. A white and blue pillow was lying partially on his body near his face. A medical investigator who went to the apartment that day noticed the dried track of a tear that had run down from his eye, according to the warrant.
Simmons in an interview with detectives that afternoon described what she did with her son over the weekend and that her son was in good health. She was supposed to return Antwan to the relative acting as his guardian that day, according to the warrant.
“When Destene Simmons was asked about events that occurred after she put her son in the bed, she refused to answer, stating, ‘I’m not going to talk about that,'” the warrant said. She asked for an attorney.
Police considered Simmons a person of interest and considered the death suspicious.
Conflicting autopsies
The Broward County associate medical examiner who performed Antwan’s autopsy could not determine the boy’s cause and manner of death, according to the warrant, writing that “the autopsy does not reveal an anatomical cause of death.”
“The circ*mstances around the death suggest otherwise,” the associate medical examiner wrote, according to the warrant. “There are soft evidences suggesting asphyxia but cannot be determined with any medical certainty.”
The police investigation was still open by the time Hope Sr.’s attorney contacted them in 2014, seeking to review Antwan’s autopsy for their negligence lawsuit against DCF and ChildNet. A separate coroner performed a secondary evaluation as part of the lawsuit, determining that Antwan’s death was a homicide from asphyxiation, according to the arrest warrant and civil court records.
DCF was dismissed from the lawsuit in 2016, and Hope Sr. and ChildNet settled in 2017, court records show.
A Coral Springs Police detective was again assigned to the case in 2022 and asked the Broward Medical Examiner’s Office to review Antwan’s case, the warrant said. In November 2023, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Rebecca MacDougall said the findings suggest Antwan died from asphyxiation and that his manner of death would be changed from undetermined to homicide.
Coral Springs Police then began searching for Simmons and learned this June that she had lived in Redmond, Washington, the warrant said. Police early last month began tracking her location through information from her cellphone provider.
A judge issued an order Saturday requiring Simmons to undergo a mental health screening, court records show. Attorney information was not available. She remains in the North Broward Bureau.
Information from the Sun Sentinel archives was used in this report.
Originally Published:
