Broward mom faces murder charge a decade after her son died during an unsupervised visit
Antwan Hope died in 2013 during an unsupervised weekend visit at a South Florida home with his troubled mother, from whom he was taken years prior after investigators discovered she had tried to smother him. The 4-year-old’s death catapulted a probe that ended with Florida’s child protection agency slammed for its failures.
Now, a decade later, the boy’s mother — long suspected of being responsible for his demise — was arrested and jailed Friday in Broward County.
Destene Simmons, 34, faces first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse charges. Jail records indicate that she’s being held without bond in the North Broward Bureau in Pompano Beach.
The Florida Department of Children and Families removed Antwan from Simmons’ care after she was committed to a mental health facility in 2011. But a few years later, on June 7, 2013, ChildNet, DCF’s private child welfare group in Broward, reunited Antwan with his mother after she met several conditions that could allow her unsupervised visitation.
The 4-year-old would be dead three days later. He had just graduated from preschool a week before.
‘Needed to be rescued’
The circumstances of Antwan’s death, which Coral Springs police called “suspicious,” have been unclear for a decade. Simmons, according to the Miami Herald’s archives, waited 10 to 15 hours before calling police.
The Miami Herald reached out to Antwan Hope, the boy’s father, who on Sunday afternoon declined to comment, citing that he was processing the recent news.
“My son was everything to me,” Hope told the Herald at the time. “I’ve been a father to my son, and now he’s gone.”
Antwan, according to his aunt Deborah Jackson, was a bright child, who “just needed to be rescued.”
“They put him in the hands of death,” Jackson said back in 2013.
Not the first time
Years before Antwan’s death, Simmons was already on the radar of law enforcement, child welfare authorities and mental health professionals.
In 2011, Simmons attempted to smother 2-year-old Antwan, placing a pillow over his face, according to the Herald’s archives. DCF failed to act — despite a June 13, 2011, report penned by Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies detailing the incident.
The child protection agency stated that Antwan, who was then a toddler, never divulged what his mother did.
Antwan’s grandmother Shonta Rivers, however, saw what unfolded that day at the Coral Springs home. The boy, she said, was lying in bed with his mother when she asked Simmons if she could give him a kiss.
Enraged, Simmons replied: “I will make sure you can’t see him.”
Simmons then took the boy into another room, shutting the door. Shortly after, Rivers overheard Antwan pleading with his mother to stop. She opened the door — and witnessed Simmons holding a pillow over Antwan’s face.
The mother’s descent into mental health issues was documented in calls to law enforcement, starting in the spring of 2011, the Herald previously reported.
At one point, Simmons’ mother said she had been “acting irrational” and she didn’t know what had happened. Her daughter, she said, “turned into a different person and does not let anyone get near Antwan.”
Simmons was taken to a mental health facility under Florida’s involuntary commitment law, the Baker Act. Child protection workers took the boy to live with his father, where he remained until Simmons came to the home and made “verbal threats to harm the child.”
Is agency culpable?
Antwan’s tragic story emerged in a scathing report on DCF’s systemic failure to protect children in dysfunctional households.
The 2013 document uncovered that DCF seldom intervened in a meaningful way, despite also finding that the leading cause of death among children in the review was suffocation by parents or family members.
“What may have been the attempted murder of this child in 2011 was disregarded because the child, less than 3-years-old at the time of the attempted suffocation, did not ‘disclose’ that the incident had occurred,” the report said.
Miami Herald staff writer Carol Marbin Miller contributed to this report
This story was originally published August 25, 2024 at 4:39 PM.
