‘Brennan is close by.’ Heartbroken Waveland mother searches for the son she knows is dead.
Not a shred of Christmas hangs in Missy Simolke’s apartment.
She has now lost two of her three sons, one to brain cancer in 2010, the other, well, she is not sure how her youngest, Brennan Simolke, died.
His body has not been found, but she knows he is dead. She does not know for sure who killed him. She does not know where, how or why he was killed, although she has her suspicions.
Only one thing does she know for certain: Brennan’s body will be found. She is determined.
The school custodian works nights and has spent her days chasing leads since Brennan disappeared July 24.
She estimates that she has logged 30,000 to 40,000 miles in her beat-up Chevy Trailblazer, searching woods and ditches filled with water, scanning roadsides for his body.
She’ll think about justice later. Right now, she just wants to bring her baby home.
“You have no idea what it’s like when you’re in the woods and you smell something horrible and you’re going toward the smell instead of running away from it,” Simolke told the Sun Herald, navigating the Trailblazer through the narrow roads in a Waveland neighborhood where Brennan made one of his last stops.
Brennan Simolke was his mom’s ‘baby’
Missy Simolke was 19 years old when she gave birth to twins Brandon and Bryan. Brennan was born three years later.
The twins loved to hunt and fish, but her youngest son never liked to get dirty.
“He was the baby,” said his mother, seated in a recliner in her apartment, a weak winter sun lighting the hazel eyes she passed along to her youngest son.
“When I had the twins, I was strict, strict. I eased up on (Brennan), so he became my little hellion.”
He grew into a clothes horse who loved to socialize. He had an affinity for neon socks with graphic patterns.
His self confidence was visible: He swaggered rather than walked into a room. Seven mirrors hang in his cramped bedroom in his mother’s two-bedroom apartment. He liked to look at himself.
Brennan’s parents were married until his father’s death of cancer in 2018 but lived in separate homes after Hurricane Katrina. They worked better as best friends, his mom said.
The twins lived with her, Brennan with his father, at least until he was 17. He spent most of his adult years in jail on drug charges. Many of his friends were Simon City Royals.
Friends with Simon City Royals
The Hancock County Sheriff’s Office believes Brennan was a Simon City Royal, too, but his mom insists that was not the case.
She knew Brennan hung around with gang members. She knew he liked to smoke marijuana. She preferred to know what he was doing rather than have him lie to her, something she always stressed.
“A mother’s love,” she said, “is unconditional.”
His friends were often at her house because she accepted them.
Brennan’s last known stop the night he disappeared was at a house on Sunflower Street in Bayside Park, a subdivision in Hancock County known for gang and drug activity. His mom later found out he had gone there to sell methamphetamine.
Later that night, Hancock County deputies pulled over a car on Interstate 10 after a brief chase. One of the occupants bolted from the car and escaped into the woods. Deputies were told it was Brennan. They were not able to verify that claim.
Missy Simolke has studied grainy video of the stop, shot from a vehicle behind the one stopped. She does not believe the other two occupants of the car are being truthful. She is convinced the man who ran was not her son.
If he had been in a high-speed chase, she said, he would have called to tell her. He always checked in.
“He wasn’t in the car,” she said. “I bet everything I own he wasn’t in that car. He never left Sunflower Street.”
She believes ‘tweakers’ were involved
She’s heard gruesome rumors about what happened next. Her mother had to be rushed to the hospital with a possible heart attack after someone told her Brennan’s body had been cut up and scattered from Pearl River County to the Kiln. (His grandmother, it turned out, had suffered a panic attack.)
The more Missy Simolke thought about this rumor, the less she believed it. She said she started trying to think like a “tweaker,” slang for someone strung out on meth. Most of the tweakers Brennan knew did not have cars.
They get around on bicycles. She just can’t see them being organized enough to cut up and scatter Brennan’s body, or having the vehicle to scatter his remains.
Friends of Brennan’s have brought her phones they managed to steal from Bayside. The screens are always cracked. She can’t get in the phones. She turns them in at the sheriff’s office.
Her search for Brennan’s body has included dragging anchors attached to ropes through water-filled ditches in wooded areas. She’s caught herself looking for buzzards as she drives, thinking they might lead her to her son’s body.
She would not be horrified, she said, if she drug up Brennan’s torso from a ditch. Instead, she tells herself that she would just be relieved to have part of her son back.
Somebody out there knows what happened, she says on Facebook. She implores them to come forward. She is not worried about riling up members of the Simon City Royals.
“If they want me,” she said, “they’ll come and get me. I’m not scared. If the good Lord’s going to take me, he will take me.”
Her telephone number and two pictures of her heavily tattooed son are printed on the flyers hands out from the dashboard of her car. Simolke wants more than anything to bring Brennan home for Christmas.
“I believe if Brennan is somewhere, he’s close,” she said. “I really and truly believe that Brennan is close by.”
This story was originally published December 16, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
