Woman Gets 8 Years in 5-Month-Old's Beating Death

A 62-year-old District woman was sentenced to eight years in prison yesterday for the 2006 beating death of her 5-month-old great-great-nephew.

Prosecutors said Shirley Wilson, of the 2300 block of 11th St. NW, was babysitting for Demarcus Simmons at her apartment during Father's Day weekend in 2006 after his mother dropped him off. Two days later, when Demarcus's mother arrived, she found her son's lifeless body strapped in his car seat, under Wilson's dining room table.

In an autopsy, Chief Medical Examiner Marie-Lydie Y. Pierre-Louis ruled that Demarcus died of a blunt impact to the head and had been dead for at least 24 hours when his body was found. The autopsy also revealed bruising on the baby's face, a subdural hematoma and hemorrhaging down the spinal column.

During the nearly two-hour sentencing session yesterday in D.C. Superior Court, Assistant U.S. Attorney June Marie Jeffries painted Wilson as a callous, remorseless woman who often used drugs and alcohol. Wilson, a mother of five, pleaded guilty in March to voluntary manslaughter and first-degree cruelty to children.

Jeffries said that over more than 30 years, three other children received traumatic injuries while in Wilson's care. Two of them were her own. Wilson's infant son died in 1969, Jeffries said, and a medical examiner listed the cause of death as "pending." Wilson's daughter suffered a broken arm, Jeffries said.

"Miss Wilson has been a danger to children for a number of years. We're here today because one of those children died," Jeffries said.

Jeffries displayed poster-size photos of Demarcus's body in a hospital morgue. She played the 911 call that his mother made from a neighbor's apartment after arriving to pick him up.

Jeffries then played the police investigation video, taken just hours after Wilson was arrested. In it, Wilson appears agitated and defensive, telling detectives that she thought the baby had frozen to death because he was too close to a fan. She sounds angry that she often had to babysit for free, saying her great-niece would "leave that burden on me."

Bobby Brown, Demarcus's father, sat in the courtroom with tears rolling down his face. He told Judge Erik P. Christian that his family was still in pain over the death. "Justice will never be served for this. He was nothing but 5 months old," Brown said. Several times, Demarcus's mother, LaWanda Simmons, sobbed and stepped out of the courtroom.

Since her arrest and during the two years she has spent at a halfway house, Wilson has never said how Demarcus was injured. Christian repeatedly asked for an explanation.

"I don't know what happened," Wilson told the judge. "Even though he's gone, I can't bring him back. I truly don't know what happened."

Before issuing his sentence, Christian praised Wilson for completing her drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation program and shied away from giving her the 10 years that prosecutors were seeking. "She still must address what she has done to a soul that never got started," he said.