One of 2005’s Unforgotten Homicides

By NADIA PFLAUM

A dozen people showed up at the gravesite of 15-year-old Charles T. Simpson recently to mark the third anniversary of his slaying. Simpson’s mother, Pamela, handed out Dixie cups containing citronella tea light candles. The family, joined by former Mayor Pro-Tem Alvin Brooks, formed a shivering half-circle around the boy’s headstone in the Forest Hill Calvary Cemetery at 69th and Troost. The wind soon blew out all the candles.

“He was my partner,” his sister, 20-year-old Kiera Simpson, said at the February 10 vigil. “My mother had six kids and we all paired up. He and I always celebrated our birthdays together.”

“He was a good boy,” Pamela Simpson remembered, her voice wavering. “Nobody ever had anything bad to say about the child… I’d be less of a mother if I didn’t try to get some justice for him.”

Simpson was the 17th homicide of 2005, a year that ended with an alarming 127 homicides in Kansas City. He was shot walking home from after-school activities at Operation Breakthrough, where he’d proudly showed off a photocopied sheet of his report card from East Elementary School – he’d gotten straight Bs.

Simpson made it to his grandmother’s driveway at 58th and Indiana, where he collapsed and later died at the hospital.

Operation Breakthrough had a scholarship account saved for him with $40,000 in it, according to his mother. A co-founder of Operation Breakthrough, Sister Berta Sailer, told The Kansas City Star in 2005 that Simpson always talked about wanting to run for president — “if” he grew up.

The unsolved killing still bothers Detective Matt “Buck” Williams of the Kansas City Police Department. “It’s tough when your crime scene consists of him, and that’s about it. There were no eyewitnesses,” Williams says. “It’s our job to solve them, and when you don’t, you feel like you failed.”

Anyone with any information on Simpson’s slaying should call the TIPS hotline, 816-474-TIPS.