Donta Jermaine Simmons, 29, was a man from Oxon Hill, Maryland, whose last day began like any other and ended in sudden violence on March 11, 2010. That afternoon, he was shot, and in the frantic minutes afterward he made his way to a hospital on his own—walking in wounded—before collapsing into the hands of medical staff and police who were called to respond. He died shortly after arriving.
Investigators said the shooting happened in the 900 block of Irvington Street in Oxon Hill.
The account that emerged in the first wave of reporting painted a tense, close-range kind of tragedy: Simmons and the person accused of shooting him knew each other, and the gunfire came after a dispute between acquaintances—an argument that escalated past the point of taking back words. After the shots, Simmons traveled roughly a mile to United Medical Center in Southeast Washington, D.C., where officers were dispatched on a report of a walk-in gunshot victim.
By the next day, police had named a suspect and announced an arrest. Charde Monet Walls, 17, of Oxon Hill, was charged as an adult in connection with Simmons’s death. Authorities said she was charged with first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and use of a handgun in the commission of a felony. Police reported that she was located in the District—on the 400 block of Seventh Street NE—and taken into custody by D.C. police, then held there while awaiting extradition back to Prince George’s County.
Behind the stark language of “charges” and “warrant,” Simmons’s death landed in the middle of a family that had to keep living through the silence left behind. In his obituary, he was remembered as the beloved son of Paula Simmons-Prioleau and Gregory Simmons, and as a father to four children—daughters London, Iyana, and Asia, and a son, Avery. The notice also named siblings and his fiancée, and it laid out the painful logistics that follow a sudden death: a viewing and funeral service days later, and burial at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Suitland.
The public trail that remains easily accessible online centers on the immediate aftermath—where the shooting happened, how Simmons reached the hospital, and the arrest and charges filed against Walls. In the sources describing the case at the time, the story is captured at that early, raw stage, with the courtroom future still unsettled and largely unchronicled in those same public accounts.
