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Nearly six years after Taylor Parker killed pregnant friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock and her daughter Braxlynn Sage, the victim’s mother insisted that the killer is “evil” and not “crazy.”
While speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Simmons-Hancock’s mother, Jessica Brookes, and her sister, Emily Shirley, looked back on their loved one’s horrific murder.
“It’s hard to not say evil, to be honest,” Brookes said of Parker, 33. “I believe that she is just evil because it’s so hard to imagine what she did.”
Parker was pretending to be pregnant when she killed Simmons-Hancock, 21, on October 9, 2020. After she brutally attacked Simmons-Hancock, Parker performed a C-section and cut out Braxlynn Sage before she fled the scene. Parker, whose alleged due date of September 22 had come and gone, then called 911 to claim she had given birth on the side of the road.
Shirley agreed that Parker is “evil,” adding that she believes “no crazy person could have gotten this all strategically planned out like she did.”
Brookes then pointed out that Parker’s crime was deliberate. “There’s such a fine line that we use the word crazy so often that it’s just become that’s what a person is if they don’t think the same way a normal person would think,” she said. “But I believe that she is just evil.”
It was Brookes that found Simmons-Hancock after the murder, and she recalled spotting a bloody fingerprint on the door of her late daughter’s home.
“I knew I had to preserve the crime scene,” she said, explaining that she used her shirt to enter the home instead of directly touching the blood. “There was no question that Reagan was no longer with us.”
After Parker called 911, she was brought to the hospital and doctors quickly learned that she had not given birth to Braxlynn Sage. In fact, doctors eventually determined she was not able to get pregnant after she had undergone a hysterectomy.
Authorities began to question Parker while she was still in the hospital, and she was arrested later that day for the killings of Simmons-Hancock and Braxlynn Sage.
Parker was found guilty of capital murder and kidnapping in October 2022 and was sentenced to death. She is currently the youngest woman on death row in Texas as she awaits her execution date.
Her case recently re-entered the spotlight after it was featured in Netflix’s June documentary Maternal Instinct.
The documentary’s director, Jessica Dimmock, recently revealed why she chose to not include Parker’s mental health diagnosis in the documentary.
“At trial, the defense put on experts who testified that she had several psychiatric disorders, but the State’s experts argued her actions were attributed to psychopathy,” she told Netflix’s Tudum.
After she admitted there’s “there’s no way to know for sure” what may have led Parker to commit the crimes, she said that she chose to not include the theory in the documentary because Parker “did not attempt an insanity defense.”
“For [Reagan’s] family, that’s an important distinction: It doesn’t matter what was wrong with her,” she said. “The jury found her guilty and sentenced her to death.”
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