Bill Schuette For Michigan Attorney General

By Dawson Bell

Free Press Staff Writer 

The mother of a murdered Genesee County boy whose killers escaped prosecution for more than 20 years blamed some of the delay today on Prosecutor David Leyton, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, who she said declined to file charges or meet with her to explain why. 

Brenda Simpson, appearing at a Lansing news conference with Leyton’s Republican opponent Bill Schuette, said Leyton doesn’t “deserve a promotion” because of his decision not to prosecute in the poisoning and drowning death of her 11-year-old son in 1985. 

Leyton reviewed evidence in Christopher Alan Brown’s death in 2005, but formal charges and the conviction of two other relatives didn’t come until more than two years later when the attorney general took the case. 

Schuette hinted the circumstances of the Brown case are likely to be featured in an upcoming commercial. 

“The door slammed” on Brenda Simpson, Schuette said, because Leyton “refused to seek justice.” 

Leyton’s campaign released a statement from the father of another Genesee County murder victim, who said Leyton “stood up for us when no one else would … (and) prosecuted the case to the fullest.” But Leyton was not available to comment on Simpson’s allegations. 

The body of Simpson’s son was found in the Flint River 18 days after his disappearance in April 1985. He had been last seen by his stepmother (one of two people eventually convicted in his death). Simpson said Monday that Leyton’s office agreed to review her son’s death in 2005 after she and police investigators sought action. Despite witness statements and evidence from a new post-mortem exam that indicated he had been poisoned before he went in the river, Leyton declined to file charges, Simpson said. 

She said she camped outside his office, but the prosecutor “refused to meet with me.” The attorney general subsequently won the conviction of the stepmother and her brother on first-degree murder using the same witness statements and evidence, Simpson said. 

In reports published in the Flint Journal in 2005, Leyton said he believed that Christopher Alan Brown had been murdered but did not have enough evidence to proceed. 

Leyton spokesman Todd Cook said this evening the campaign declined to comment on the Brown case, saying the statement from Flint Pastor Kevelin Jones, whose daughter was raped and murdered in 2005 and supports the Genesee County prosecutor, would be “our only response for now.”