Brandon Lamarr Sims

Title

The Inconvenience Gone: The Tragic Death of Brandon Lamarr Sims

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 23, 2025

In the annals of American criminal justice, certain cases stand out not only for their tragedy but for their legal significance. The death of four-year-old Brandon Lamarr Sims in 1992 represents both a heartbreaking failure to protect a vulnerable child and a groundbreaking legal precedent that would forever change how prosecutors approach murder cases without physical evidence. This Indianapolis case became the first in Indiana history where someone was convicted of murder without the recovery of the victim's body, setting a precedent that continues to influence the justice system more than three decades later.

Brandon's story is one of systemic failures, missed opportunities, and the devastating consequences when society's most vulnerable members fall through the cracks. It is also a story of determination by law enforcement officers and prosecutors who refused to let a child's death go unpunished, even when faced with seemingly insurmountable legal obstacles.

A Child Born into Adversity

Brandon Lamarr Sims entered the world on November 11, 1987, at Wishard Hospital (now known as Eskenazi Health Foundation) in Indianapolis, Indiana. From the moment of his birth, his life was marked by circumstances that would make his journey extraordinarily difficult. His mother, Michelle Engron Jones, was only fifteen years old, herself still a child grappling with the responsibilities of motherhood while navigating a life already scarred by trauma and instability.

The story of Brandon's conception reveals the harsh realities that defined his mother's young life. Michelle became pregnant at fourteen after what she described as non-consensual relations with a high school senior. When she revealed her pregnancy to her mother, Mae Engron, the response was violent and devastating. According to court records and testimony from the prosecutor who later handled Michelle's case, Mae beat her pregnant daughter in the stomach with a board and subsequently kicked her out of the family home.

This traumatic rejection initiated a cascade of instability that would define both Michelle's and Brandon's early years. Michelle was placed in a series of group homes and foster families, moving through Indiana's child welfare system while carrying her unborn son. The father of her child, Kevin Lamarr Sims, was barely an adult himself and was serving jail time when Brandon was born.

Given these circumstances, Brandon was placed in the care of his paternal grandmother, Arlene Blevins, shortly after birth. This arrangement would prove to be the most stable and loving period of his short life. Arlene provided the kind of consistent, nurturing care that both Michelle and Brandon desperately needed, and by all accounts, Brandon thrived under her care during his first three years.

The Medical Challenge That Changed Everything

During his time with his grandmother, Brandon was diagnosed with a rare medical condition that would profoundly impact both his physical development and his mother's perception of him. He suffered from gonadotropin-independent precocious puberty, a disorder that caused his body to begin sexual maturation far earlier than normal. This condition meant that although Brandon was chronologically four years old at the time of his death, he had the physical appearance of a seven-year-old, complete with body hair, body odor, and other signs of sexual development that would typically not appear until much later in childhood.

The condition was treatable with medication, but treatment required consistent medical care and a committed caregiver who understood the complexities of managing the disorder. Without proper treatment, children with this condition experience rapid early growth followed by premature fusion of their growth plates, ultimately resulting in shorter than average adult height. More significantly, the visible manifestations of the condition often create social and psychological challenges for both the child and their caregivers.

Arlene Blevins later testified that Michelle's reaction to Brandon's diagnosis was deeply troubling. According to Arlene, Michelle made a statement that would become central to understanding her mindset regarding her son: she said she "didn't want to raise a freak." This cruel characterization of her son's medical condition revealed a fundamental rejection of Brandon as he was, suggesting that she saw his disability not as a challenge to be managed with love and medical care, but as an insurmountable burden that made him unworthy of her care.

A Mother's Claim and a Son's Disappearance

In 1990, when Michelle turned eighteen, she made the decision that would seal Brandon's fate. Despite having spent most of her teenage years in foster care and having limited experience with consistent parenting, she insisted on taking custody of her son from his grandmother. This decision was Michelle's legal right as Brandon's mother, but it represented a dramatic change for a little boy who had known stability and love under Arlene's care.

Initially, Brandon continued to visit his grandmother and father regularly after moving in with Michelle. However, by 1991, these visits became increasingly infrequent. When Kevin Sims and Arlene Blevins called to request time with Brandon, Michelle began refusing their requests. Eventually, she stopped returning their calls altogether and moved without providing them with her new contact information. When Kevin attempted to mail child support checks to Michelle, they were returned unopened, suggesting that she preferred complete separation from Brandon's paternal family over accepting any financial assistance that might come with expectations of continued contact.

The last confirmed sighting of Brandon by anyone other than his mother occurred shortly after his fourth birthday. Arlene Blevins spotted him playing outside a mosque that Michelle attended, but this glimpse would be the final time anyone from his father's family would see the little boy alive.

In July 1992, Michelle traveled to Detroit, Michigan, with a friend named Deborah Asante to attend a theater conference. When Deborah asked about Brandon's whereabouts, Michelle claimed he was staying with a babysitter. This trip marked a turning point in how Michelle spoke about her son. After returning from Detroit, friends and acquaintances noticed that they never saw Brandon anymore. When they inquired about his absence, Michelle offered various explanations, claiming he was living with his father or staying with his paternal grandmother in another state.

The Telltale Signs

During the summer of 1992, several disturbing incidents occurred that, in retrospect, suggest something terrible had happened to Brandon. Michelle's apartment manager at the Georgetown Apartments noticed a massive swarm of flies covering one of the bedroom windows in Michelle's unit. When questioned about this alarming sight, Michelle claimed that Brandon had wet the bed and that the flies were attracted to the smell of urine.

This explanation raised immediate suspicions among those who heard it. Neighbors at the apartment complex also reported observing Michelle repeatedly and obsessively cleaning both the interior and exterior of her car during this same period. The combination of the fly infestation and the compulsive car cleaning created a pattern of behavior that suggested Michelle was attempting to eliminate evidence of something far more serious than a bedwetting accident.

On January 1, 1993, Michelle moved out of the Georgetown Apartments and relocated to live with a friend named Mahalia Aamir. When the apartment manager inspected Michelle's former unit after her departure, she found the apartment relatively clean but noticed a large brown stain on the floor of Brandon's bedroom. This stain, combined with the previous summer's fly infestation, painted a disturbing picture of what might have occurred in that room.

By December 1993, Kevin Sims and Arlene Blevins had grown increasingly frustrated with their inability to contact Brandon. Having learned that Michelle was living with Mahalia, they contacted her seeking help in reaching the little boy. Mahalia's response was shocking: she told them she hadn't seen Brandon in two years and had been told by Michelle that he was living with them. This revelation meant that even Michelle's close friends had not seen Brandon for an extended period, despite Michelle's claims that he was simply staying elsewhere.

The Confession That Changed Everything

The break in the case came in January 1994, when Michelle voluntarily checked herself into the Midtown Community Mental Health Center. During her stay at this facility, she made a confession to mental health counselors that would ultimately lead to her prosecution for murder. Michelle told the counselors that she had severely beaten Brandon and then left him alone in his room for at least a week, with food and water placed in saucers on the floor like provisions for an animal.

According to her account, when she finally returned to check on him, she found Brandon dead in his bedroom. She claimed that she wrapped his body in a blanket and drove to a wooded area along north Interstate 65 in Clinton County, Indiana, near Lafayette, where she dumped his body without burial or any attempt to notify authorities or Brandon's family.

The mental health workers who heard this confession were bound by law to report it to authorities, which they did immediately. This confession represented the first concrete evidence that Brandon was not simply living with relatives in another state, as Michelle had been claiming, but was actually dead.

The Investigation Begins

Detective Tommy Crooke of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department was assigned to investigate Michelle's confession. Crooke approached the case with the thoroughness and determination that would prove crucial to securing a conviction in what seemed like an impossible case. He began by verifying Brandon's existence and documenting his life, obtaining his birth certificate, medical records from both Wishard Hospital and Riley Children's Hospital, welfare records, and even the birth announcement that Arlene Blevins had saved.

Crooke's investigation confirmed that Brandon was indeed a real child and not a figment of Michelle's imagination, as some initially suspected. The detective interviewed numerous witnesses who had known both Michelle and Brandon, gradually building a comprehensive picture of the little boy's life and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance.

One of the most significant pieces of evidence came from witness testimony about Michelle's behavior and statements. Friends and acquaintances testified that Brandon had been repeatedly abused in the months leading up to his disappearance, often bearing visible bruises. Witnesses described seeing Michelle hit Brandon with a shoe and leave him with friends for days at a time. The testimony painted a picture of escalating abuse and neglect that culminated in Brandon's death.

Perhaps most damning was the testimony of Clarice Dunlap, a friend of Michelle's who had heard something that would prove crucial to the prosecution's case. In November 1995, Dunlap made an anonymous phone call to the prosecutor's office, revealing that Michelle had confessed to her that she had beaten Brandon, left him alone for several days, and returned to find him dead. When Dunlap had asked Michelle directly if she had beaten Brandon to death, Michelle's response was chilling: "I guess so."

The Legal Challenge

The case presented unprecedented legal challenges for the Marion County Prosecutor's Office. No one in Indiana had ever been convicted of murder without the recovery of the victim's body. The concept of "corpus delicti," which requires proof that a crime actually occurred, seemed nearly impossible to establish without physical evidence of Brandon's death.

Prosecutor Diane Marger Moore, though relatively inexperienced with murder cases, took on the challenge when more seasoned prosecutors declined to handle what seemed like an unwinnable case. Moore recognized that the circumstantial evidence, while compelling, would need to be presented in a way that convinced a jury that Brandon was indeed dead and that Michelle was responsible for his death.

The prosecution's strategy focused on several key elements: the witness testimony about abuse, the suspicious circumstances surrounding Brandon's disappearance, the fly infestation in his bedroom, Michelle's contradictory statements about his whereabouts, and her eventual confession. They also brought in forensic experts who testified that the massive fly infestation described by the apartment manager would be consistent with a decomposing body, not with urine as Michelle had claimed.

Michelle was initially charged with two counts of neglect of a dependent in September 1995. However, when Clarice Dunlap came forward with Michelle's confession about beating Brandon to death, the charges were elevated. In October 1996, Michelle was charged with one count of murder and one count of neglect of a dependent.

The Trial and Conviction

The trial of State of Indiana v. Michelle Engron Jones became a landmark case in Indiana legal history. The prosecution faced the daunting task of proving murder without a body, relying entirely on circumstantial evidence and witness testimony. Michelle pleaded not guilty to all charges, forcing the case to go to a jury trial.

During the trial, prosecutors methodically presented their case, calling witnesses who testified about Michelle's abuse of Brandon, the suspicious circumstances of his disappearance, and her various contradictory explanations for his absence. The testimony about the fly infestation proved particularly powerful, with forensic experts explaining that such an infestation would be consistent with a decomposing body but not with urine.

The prosecution also presented evidence about Michelle's behavior after Brandon's disappearance, including her repeated washing of her car and her varied explanations for Brandon's absence. They argued that her pattern of lies and deception, combined with the physical evidence and witness testimony, proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she had killed her son.

Michelle's defense team attempted to mitigate her actions by arguing that she had been abused as a child herself and was not prepared for motherhood. They tried to present her as a victim of circumstances rather than a perpetrator of murder. However, the jury found the prosecution's case compelling.

In a historic verdict, Michelle Engron Jones was found guilty of murder and neglect of a dependent. The court imposed a fifty-year sentence for murder and a three-year sentence for neglect of a dependent, with the sentences to be served concurrently. Michelle's attorneys appealed the conviction, as is standard procedure, but the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld her conviction, establishing important precedent for future cases involving missing victims.

The Search That Never Ended

Despite Michelle's conviction, Brandon's body was never recovered. Authorities made repeated attempts to search the area along Interstate 65 where Michelle claimed to have disposed of his body, but these searches yielded no results. The failure to locate Brandon's remains meant that his father and grandmother were never able to give him a proper burial, adding another layer of tragedy to an already devastating case.

The inability to find Brandon's body raised questions about the accuracy of Michelle's confession regarding the disposal site. Some investigators speculated that she may have been deliberately misleading about the location, either to protect herself or simply because she could not accurately remember where she had left his body. Others suggested that the body might have been moved by animals or natural forces in the years between his death and the searches.

The Aftermath and Lasting Impact

The Brandon Sims case established crucial legal precedent in Indiana and influenced similar cases across the country. It demonstrated that murder convictions could be obtained without a body when circumstantial evidence was sufficiently compelling. This precedent has been cited in numerous subsequent cases where victims' bodies were never recovered.

The case also highlighted significant gaps in the child welfare system and the challenges of protecting children from abusive parents. Brandon's story illustrated how a child could disappear from the radar of social services, schools, and medical providers without anyone raising immediate alarms. His condition required ongoing medical treatment that he never received, yet no one in the system followed up on his care.

Kevin Sims and Arlene Blevins were left to cope with the loss of a beloved child and grandchild, compounded by the fact that they had been prevented from seeing him in his final months and were never able to recover his body for burial. Their grief was complicated by knowledge that they had tried to maintain contact with Brandon but had been systematically shut out by his mother.

An Unexpected Epilogue

The story of Brandon Sims took an unexpected turn decades later when his mother became the center of a national controversy about redemption, rehabilitation, and second chances. While serving her sentence, Michelle Jones transformed herself into an accomplished scholar and researcher. She earned two college degrees while incarcerated and conducted groundbreaking historical research on women's correctional institutions in Indiana.

Michelle's academic work was so impressive that she was accepted into several prestigious doctoral programs, including Harvard University's history program. However, Harvard ultimately rescinded her acceptance after some faculty members raised concerns about her failure to fully detail her crime in her application materials. The controversy over Harvard's decision sparked national debates about forgiveness, rehabilitation, and whether someone who had committed such a horrific crime could ever be truly redeemed.

Michelle was ultimately released from prison in August 2017 after serving twenty years of her fifty-year sentence, having been granted early release based on her good behavior and educational achievements. She enrolled in a doctoral program at New York University, where she continues her academic work while advocating for criminal justice reform and prisoners' rights.

The Questions That Remain

More than thirty years after Brandon's death, fundamental questions about his case remain unanswered. His body has never been found, leaving his family without closure and investigators without physical evidence that might have provided additional details about how he died. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear, known only through Michelle's various confessions, which contained some inconsistencies.

The case also raises broader questions about how society protects its most vulnerable children. Brandon was a child with a medical condition that required ongoing care, yet he disappeared from all systems that might have protected him without anyone raising immediate concerns. His story highlights the importance of robust child protection systems and the need for multiple overlapping safeguards to ensure that children cannot simply vanish without notice.

The tragedy of Brandon Lamarr Sims serves as a stark reminder of the consequences when systemic failures converge with individual cruelty. His short life was marked by love from his grandmother and father, but ultimately defined by his mother's inability to accept him as he was. The legal precedent established by his case has helped other families find justice when their loved ones disappear, but for Brandon himself, justice came too late to save a little boy who deserved protection, medical care, and unconditional love.

A Legacy Beyond Legal Precedent

While the Brandon Sims case is remembered primarily for its legal significance as Indiana's first murder conviction without a body, it represents much more than a judicial milestone. It stands as a testament to the dedication of investigators who refused to let a child's death go unnoticed and unpunished, even when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Detective Tommy Crooke's meticulous investigation and Prosecutor Diane Marger Moore's willingness to take on an unprecedented case ensured that Brandon's death was not forgotten, even if his body was never recovered. Their work established that circumstantial evidence, when properly presented, could be sufficient to prove murder beyond a reasonable doubt.

The case also highlighted the importance of witness testimony in cases involving child abuse. The friends and acquaintances who came forward to testify about Michelle's treatment of Brandon played crucial roles in securing her conviction. Their willingness to speak out, despite potential personal costs, helped ensure that Brandon's death did not go unpunished.

For the broader community, Brandon's story serves as a reminder of the collective responsibility to protect vulnerable children. His case illustrates how quickly a child can disappear from view when multiple systems fail simultaneously, and it underscores the importance of maintaining robust safeguards to prevent such tragedies.

Today, Brandon would have been in his mid-thirties had he lived. Instead, he remains forever four years old in the memories of those who loved him and in the legal precedent that bears his legacy. His story continues to resonate with anyone who works in child protection, criminal justice, or victim advocacy, serving as both a cautionary tale and an inspiration to never give up seeking justice for those who cannot speak for themselves.

The tragic death of Brandon Lamarr Sims reminds us that behind every legal precedent lies a human story, and behind every unsolved case lies a family still seeking answers. While his body was never found, Brandon's memory lives on in the legal protections his case helped establish and in the continued efforts of those who refuse to let vulnerable children be forgotten.

Sources

Benjamin Hayes

Benjamin Hayes is a blogger with a passion for true crime and unresolved mysteries. In his free time, Benjamin is an avid hiker and photographer. He finds solace and inspiration in nature, often trekking through the scenic trails of the Appalachian Mountains.