Debra Simms holds a photo of her son in her apartment Saturday, Feb. 13, 2021. Xavier Danaurd Crockett Simms, 15, and friend Jason Moore were killed in 1996. Twenty-five years after the killings, a man has confessed to the murders, police said. At right are more photos of her son and newspapers from 1996 reporting on the murders.
Sunday, Feb. 21, 2021 | 2 a.m.
A few phone calls involving 15-year-old Xavier Crockett’s murder had deeply impacted his mother and sisters for years.
Shanreka Frost distinctly remembers the last time she spoke to her brother, even if it was more than 20 years ago when both were children.
Crockett asked his sister to save him some peanut M&Ms and Snickers Halloween candy. He was “so excited about candy all the time,” said Frost, who was 12 at the time.
Less than two weeks later, their mother, Debra Simms, got a call from a neighborhood acquaintance telling her the bodies of two unidentified boys had been found in the desert in North Las Vegas.
Already worried because Crockett missed his regular check-in, her motherly instinct sensed something terrible had happened. She knew Crockett was dead.
Later in the day, she called another sister to deliver the somber news. Ashley Schneider, then 9, remembers wishing, “I just hope he’s OK, even if he’s paralyzed.”
Last week, the family received an unexpected, different call.
This time a North Las Vegas Police detective was on the other line telling Simms that her son’s alleged killer had confessed to firing the bullets that killed Crockett and Jason Alexander Moore, 14, whose bodies were found on Nov. 8, 1996.
“Finally, almost 25 years, finally,” said Simms on Saturday, the day after she heard the news. “Finally, really, I’m elated.”
During a traffic stop Feb. 12, Metro Police found a gun on Willis King Davis and detained him, according to his arrest report. In custody, according to police, he said he wanted to “confess to killing people.”
Davis first spoke about a drive-by shooting of a teenage boy he and his friends suspected was a rival gang member. The boy was hit multiple times, said police, noting that the slaying was unsolved.
He then started talking about an early morning on Nov. 8, 1996, in a desert area near Clayton Street and Cheyenne Avenue.
Davis said someone handed him a gun and he shot one of the boys, according to the report. As the other one ran, he chased him and also killed him with a .380-caliber gun, police said.
Crockett’s family said the bodies were found about 180 feet from each other by a utility worker.
Davis is facing three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder, according to North Las Vegas Justice Court logs, which didn’t list his attorney. He’s being held without the possibility of bail.
Protective older brother
Crockett was the firstborn child in a family with seven sisters, including one who was on the way at the time of his death. He is described as a protective, loving brother.
Frost, the second oldest, remembers a hard-nosed older brother who was also kind. They would play video games together. Schneider recalls running around the house, and Xavier chasing them.
His mother looks back at her little boy, who when he was 3 wanted to cut his long, “beautiful” curly hair.
“I love your hair,” the mother said. “I want to cut it,” he replied. “I don’t want people thinking I’m a girl.”
“See, it’s better, it’s better,” Simms recalled him saying after the cut.
He was always more mature than his age suggested, said Simms, noting brutally honest conversations with him about him hanging around the wrong people. “Yes mom, yes mom,” he would say to the warnings about the dangerous streets of North Las Vegas.
But despite what trouble he got into, he was never a bad kid, she said.
Simms soon got him involved in the church. He excelled in Bible study and could quickly recite quiz answers, she said. He also worked at his stepfather’s upholstery business.
"I find it so unfair"
Before the shooting, the family home burned down, and they moved to Summerlin. Crockett, who wanted to stay at Bonanza High School, persuaded his mother to let him stay at his aunt’s house. Simms would check in with him every day, making sure he was behaving and going to class.
It was unlike Crockett to not show up to school, and Simms had spent the entire night before he was discovered dead looking for him. She felt anxious and knew something wasn’t right — an “intuition.”
When she got the phone call reporting the bodies, she grabbed Frost and headed to the scene. She saw a coroner’s van. She ran to the police on the perimeter, who didn’t let her through.
Her only son’s killing has made Simms “resentful,” but at the same time, she remembers she had seven daughters to live for. “What’s going to happen to my children, who’s going to mother these children,” she said to herself when she thought about breaking down.
Losing a child “is the most gut-wrenching feeling I’ve ever had in my entire life,” the mother said, tearing up. “Somebody just rips your heart out and said, ‘OK, I’m sorry, you just keep on going … I’m going to take that part of you, you just keep going,’ and I find it so unfair,” she added.
Visions of a smiling Xavier
In the past 24 years, Frost has found herself sobbing at each thought of her brother.
“For me being a 12-year-old girl, it broke me, it definitely changed my outlook in life,” Frost said. “I will never be the same.”
People speak about grief getting better over time, but for her the pain has “been a long, lingering thing.”
Same for Schneider, who said, “We were so broken, it totally destroyed us,” noting that they missed most of the school year after the shooting.
She’s found herself trying to learn more about her brother, going to his former schools and looking for yearbooks. On his birthday, April 8, and his death anniversary, or when she looks at his picture in her car, she bursts into tears.
Schneider has two sons, one whose middle name is Xavier. She tells her boys about their uncle.
About two years ago, she contacted police for an update on her brother’s case. When they told her they would look into it, there was a slight hope that closure was near.
Instead, it “opened up a wound that I wasn’t ready for,” she said.
For two years after his death, every morning around 4 a.m., Simms said she would see a vision of her son in the doorway, smiling at her.
For a long time, Schneider saw a white butterfly in her backyard that she could swear represented her brother, she said.
It’s these small signs that the family has hung on to. The painful anniversaries they spend together, one last November when they got matching tattoos of the butterfly.
But now, as Xavier’s birthday quickly approaches, and later the 25th anniversary of his death, the family has closure to look forward to, though they know they will never fully heal.
“This year we have to do something extremely big,” Schneider said about Nov. 8, thinking about COVID-19 restrictions. “Lay him to peace and give ourselves peace.”
