Original Article Found at Nola.com
When mother-to-be Coty Simmons settled in for a nap in the back seat of her sister’s boyfriend’s car Dec. 15, no one knew she’d never again wake up.
That night, Simmons, 20, snoozed as her kid sister Sully, 19, visited her boyfriend in the front seat of a car parked in the 4700 block of Galahad Drive in eastern New Orleans, their mother said. Just after midnight, a man emerged from the back of a house on the block, firing a gun at the car.
A bullet struck the back of Simmons’ head, police said. She was taken to University Hospital and placed on life support, but she died from the wound Saturday, said John Gagliano, the coroner’s chief investigator. Also wounded was the 27-year-old man in the car, but he was in good condition by the time EMS paramedics got him to University Hospital.
Simmons’ death ended a nine-day journey littered with tragic news for her family, said mother Stella Simmons, 48. On Christmas Eve, the family learned of the death of her fetus, just 19 weeks old. Coty Simmons planned to name him London Travell or Travell London, after his father, Travell Taylor.
On Friday, the Simmons family learned Coty was brain dead, Stella Simmons said. She died less than a day later, leaving behind her parents and a host of siblings and half-siblings.
“I never had a sister, but she was like my sister because I shared everything with her,” Stella Simmons said of her daughter, as a steady stream of relatives and friends filed into the grieving family’s Gentilly home Monday night. “If I couldn’t talk to God, I could talk to her.”
Gone was a budding young artist whose gift was never understood by her peers.
When she was a sophomore at L.E. Rabouin High School, Coty Simmons earned admission into the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. She thrived on painting still lifes of fruits and flowers. She also painted and decorated parade floats at the Mardi Gras Signature School, housed within Rabouin in 2005.
But her friends teased her about the “nerdiness” of her NOCCA venture throughout the four months she spent there, Sully Simmons said. Coty gave her art and grades a greater priority than dances, movies and going out. Her big nights out were spent with Sully, in cheap French Quarter sandwich and pizza joints, pointing and giggling at partygoers’ drunken shenanigans.
