By the time the grandmother reached the lectern, five relatives were dead, and the man responsible had already secured his plea deal. When she began to speak, he turned, met her eyes, and smirked, a small expression that now hangs over a 25 year sentence and a high-speed chase that left a minivan full of family shattered in a city intersection.
TLDR
Marshawn Stepney received 25 years in Missouri for a stolen Jeep chase that killed five family members, raising questions about plea deals and pursuits.
The man at the defense table was 21-year-old Marshawn Stepney of St. Louis, Missouri. On May 6th, 2022, a stolen Jeep Cherokee he drove through city streets at highway speeds slammed into a family’s minivan, killing five relatives and injuring two girls. In January, he pleaded guilty to five counts of second-degree murder, two counts of assault, and charges for tampering and leaving the scene of an accident, and he was sentenced in February to 25 years in prison.
Smirk in a Packed Courtroom
The sentencing hearing unfolded in a packed St. Louis courtroom, heavy with relatives wearing the faces and names of the dead on shirts and buttons. Stepney had already avoided a trial, accepting a plea that bundled five homicide counts, two assault counts, and related felonies into one 25 year term. When a family member stepped forward to deliver a victim impact statement, Stepney looked back and smiled.
Elinor Simmons, the family matriarch, watched that expression from a few feet away. She later described the look as proof of “no remorse for what he had taken from us,” a taunt in the middle of her grief. The judge addressed her directly from the bench, acknowledging that no number on a sentencing sheet could equal the loss of five lives from one family.
Simmons answered that her strength came from faith, that without it she might not have been standing there at all. Her words filled a room where the crime had already been reduced to years and counts. That disconnect, between five coffins and a single multi-decade term, is what lingers.
Five Lives in a Minivan
The crash that led to this moment tore through a multigenerational family riding together in a minivan. Inside were 34-year-old Lahronda Simmons, 44-year-old Luther Simmons, 47-year-old Ephriam Simmons, 52-year-old Anngelique Simmons, and 11-year-old Takira Thompson. All five died after the stolen Jeep struck them near Delmar Boulevard and Pendleton Avenue.
Two more children, an 8-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl, survived but with injuries serious enough to require an emergency rush to a nearby hospital. That van had been one moving point of stability on a Friday in early May. Within seconds, it became the final stop for nearly an entire branch of a family tree.
Their names appear in the charging documents and the plea agreement as lines in a list. In the neighborhood where the crash occurred, they are remembered as relatives who never made it home from a drive that should have been unremarkable.
A Stolen Jeep and a City on Edge
Hours before the fatal impact, the gray 2015 Jeep Cherokee that Stepney drove was already flagged as stolen and linked to multiple thefts around St. Louis. The vehicle moved through the city as a rolling crime scene, its plates and description broadcast in real time. Yet it stayed in motion long enough to set off an escalating chain of violence.
Near the intersection of Delmar Boulevard and Union Boulevard, the Jeep sideswiped a gray Infiniti. Instead of stopping, a passenger in the Jeep opened fire on the Infiniti as the SUV sped away. The Infiniti’s driver called 911. What started as property crime and gunfire in traffic now had a pursuing patrol presence and a panicked motorist reporting the direction of travel.
With the Jeep still rolling, officers moved to intercept. The stolen vehicle did not slow down. It simply shifted the hazard from one stretch of pavement to the next.
Pursuit Through a City Corridor
Spike strips went out on the roadway, a tactic meant to bleed speed from fleeing vehicles before they reach crowded areas. The Jeep hit the devices but did not stop. Despite disabled tires, Stepney pushed the damaged SUV through the city, reaching reported speeds of 80 mph in a corridor lined with homes, stores, and bus stops.
The chase followed Delmar, a street that cuts through residential blocks and commercial corners rather than empty industrial stretches. Drivers use it to reach grocery stores, schools, and churches. On this evening, it became a funnel drawing a stolen Jeep and an unsuspecting minivan toward the same intersection.
Near Delmar and Pendleton Avenue, the Jeep slammed into the Simmons family’s vehicle. Metal twisted, glass sprayed the pavement, and five lives ended in an instant. The force of the impact left wreckage that stunned first responders and residents who saw the aftermath.
Why a fleeing suspect in a stolen vehicle with reported gunfire managed to reach that intersection at such a high speed is one of the quiet questions under this case. Pursuits in dense urban corridors always balance the risk of letting a dangerous driver go against the risk of keeping the chase alive among other families’ cars.
Escape, Return, and Arrest
In the chaos after the crash, Stepney managed to get away from the wreckage. While medics and officers focused on the mangled minivan and the injured children, the driver of the stolen Jeep slipped out of the immediate scene. For a time, the man whose Jeep had just killed five people existed as a description, not a body in handcuffs.
He returned to the area hours later. Instead of surrendering, he contacted someone living nearby and used a phone to reach his mother, arranging a ride away from the scene. The city had a catastrophic crash, grieving relatives, a destroyed minivan, and still no arrest.
Stepney remained at large for 12 days after the collision. Nearly two weeks passed between the night the Simmons family died and the day the driver was finally taken into custody. Those lost days are now buried under the plea paperwork, but they sit uneasily against the scale of the harm.
A Plea Deal for Five Deaths
The criminal charges that grew out of the crash stacked quickly. Five counts of second-degree murder. Two counts of assault. One count of tampering. One count of leaving the scene of an accident. Each offense carried its own potential punishment measured in years, and together they represented the possibility of a life effectively spent behind bars.
In January, Stepney chose to plead guilty rather than force a trial that would have replayed the 911 calls, the ballistic evidence, and the crash reconstruction in open court. The deal that followed set a 25-year sentence. It spared the surviving children and the older relatives from testifying but also capped his punishment for five deaths and two serious injuries at a single span behind a razor wire fence.
In the courtroom, the judge acknowledged that the sentence could not equal the damage done to Delmar. Yet the law often resolves mass harm in single numbers. A 25-year term is both long enough to consume the remainder of a young man’s youth and short enough that he can imagine leaving prison before reaching old age.
For the Simmons family, there is no equivalent trade. Five names are carved into headstones, and the two surviving girls carry injuries and memories that will not be counted in parole hearings.
The Remaining Defendants and Unanswered Questions
Stepney was not alone in the Jeep on the night of the crash. Two 20-year-old men, Jaylen Holland and Walter Burton, now face their own charges. Each is accused of five counts of second-degree murder tied to the same deaths, along with armed criminal action and a set of theft-related felonies.
Investigators located Holland in the back of the Jeep with a pistol nearby, and Burton in the front passenger seat with an assault style rifle between his legs. If those allegations hold, the stolen SUV was not only a getaway vehicle but also a small traveling arsenal moving through a city neighborhood just before it plowed into a family’s van.
The cases against Holland and Burton remain unresolved, and neither man has been convicted of the homicide charges. Their fates will test how far legal responsibility stretches for passengers in a fleeing car filled with weapons. They may also surface more details about how the Jeep moved from theft scenes to a deadly intersection without ever dropping out of motion.
The pavement at Delmar and Pendleton has long since been cleared, the glass and twisted metal hauled away. What remains is a 25-year sentence for a driver who smiled at a grieving grandmother, two co-defendants still awaiting their own reckoning, and a corridor of St. Louis where residents now know exactly how much can be destroyed in the span of a single high-speed chase.
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