INCONVENIENCE GONE BY DIANE MARGER MOORE

On July 3^rd, 1992, Michelle Engron Jones beat her four-year-old son, Brandon Sims severely. She then abandoned him in his room and went to a theater convention in Detroit with two of her friends for four days.

When she finally returned to her apartment in Marion County, Indianapolis – Brandon was dead.

Although Brandon was as tall for a seven year old and could have pounded on the bedroom window, or opened his bedroom door and gotten food and water out of the refrigerator – he did not. The fact that Michelle Jones claims to have placed saucers of food on the floor of his room, tells me that she knew damned well how badly beaten he was. So much so, that he could not get up to get food.

She had a great time in Detroit, networking, being social, and meeting a later hook-up. There was no indication of any guilt or remorse on her part. Indeed, when she returned home she threw herself into her work at Eli Lily, and her hobbies, dancing and the theater group.

She carried on living her life as if everything was normal. She had merely removed an inconvenience.  Life would have gone on for Michelle, just like it was, had Brandon’s father Kevin Sims not actively searched for his son for the next eighteen months.

After a year and a half of Michelle dodging all contact with him, Kevin finally found a housemate she lived with a year and a half before. He knocked on her door and asked for Brandon. The housemate, surprised at this, told him that Michelle had said Brandon was living with him.

The flatmate Saundra Holiday then confronted Michelle. It was only because of this confrontation that Michelle admitted to murdering Brandon and then leaving his corpse to rot for four days, while she partied before finally disposing of it.

To date, the remains of Brandon Sims has never been found. His murderous mother has served her prison sentence and been released and is now seeking her doctorate in history, but Brandon has never been given the common courtesy of a proper burial.

DIANE MARGER MOORE was the prosecutor in the case against Michelle Engron Jones. She tells Brandon’s story simply and uses the official court transcripts to do so.

The reader gets the whole picture that witnesses painted of the crime. The ‘breakdown’ eighteen months later when she was confronted by the housemate, to misleading the police as to the location of the remains, the total disregard she had for the child, the non-entity he constituted in her life, the pain his father and grandmother went through as they searched for Brandon, only to find that he had been dead already, for a long time. If that does not express her callousness and call into question whether such a person can be rehabilitated, nothing will.

People can write twenty books and a hundred articles on the crimes of Michelle Engron Jones, and they can debate rehabilitation and redemption until the cows come home. When I read about her, I will keep coming back to a single point that Judge Magnus-Stinson made so clearly; Brandon was in the care of the one person he should have been able to trust with his care, the person he loved most of all – his mother – she beat him, betrayed him, and then abandoned him. There is no redemption for that. Not in this world.

I rate this book 4 stars with a strong recommendation to read for all true crime lovers. I also recommend this book for law students doing case studies and comparing various cases, this will come in handy when comparing this case to other cases of infanticide by the parent, such as the case of Caylee Anthony, whose mother Casey Anthony was arrested, tried and found not guilty of her murder.

As DIANE MARGER MOORE expresses in her book – Michelle Jones denied murdering Brandon. Casey Anthony denies killing Caylee. We know that Michelle Jones killed Brandon. What do we know about Casey Anthony that makes her so different from Michelle Jones?