Cases will proceed against a Southeast Washington advisory neighborhood commissioner accused of threatening to shoot a rival commissioner and separately threatening to kill the mother of his child.
A grand jury will now look at the case, court files show.
In an affidavit for an arrest warrant, D.C. police said a commissioner filed a complaint that Simmons, 28, had threatened him following a commission meeting Jan. 9 outside the RISE Center on the St. Elizabeth’s East campus.
Advisory neighborhood commissioners are elected to two-year terms without pay to represent residents at the neighborhood level.
The complaining commissioner told police that Simmons had threatened to shoot him in the head in response to a dispute about Simmons’s election to the chairman’s seat for the 8E commission, a seven-seat body of commissioners in Ward 8.
Christopher Hawthorne told The Washington Post that he is the commissioner named in the complaint.
Police said Hawthorne reported that Simmons had threatened him on two previous occasions, the police affidavits state.
“He’s innocent, and we will try our case in court,” said Simmons’s attorney Gretchen Franklin, who declined to comment further about the pair of cases.
Judge Rainey Brandt modified a stay-away order to allow Simmons to attend ANC meetings, but the order continued to ban him from contacting his accuser outside the monthly sessions.
Simmons is serving his second term as commissioner for ANC E04, a seat he first won in 2016 with 468 votes to the second-place finisher’s 400, according to D.C. Board of Elections data. He won reelection in November by a 43-vote margin.
Hawthorne told police that Simmons first threatened him at a meeting Dec. 3, when Hawthorne was appointed acting chairman of the 8E commission, according to court files and an interview with Hawthorne. Simmons told Hawthorne he would take out his gun and pistol whip him, court records said.
Simmons then was elected to the chairmanship at the Jan. 7 meeting, but the vote was later nullified over a dispute about an ineligible voter, the arrest affidavit states, and a new vote was set.
The dispute between the commissioners reignited two days later after a meeting of all Ward 8 commissioners at RISE Center, according to court documents and Hawthorne.
In the arrest complaint, detectives quoted Simmons as saying people were lucky they “didn’t get on my bad side. . . . You know that if you would have got on my bad side, I would [have] shot you in the head. I don’t care nothing about your family.”
The complaint said the two men continued to exchange words before Simmons challenged Hawthorne to “come outside.” The confrontation continued briefly before another commissioner, who is not named in the detectives’ account, broke it up.
“I took the threat of his words that he was going to take my life seriously,” Hawthorne said in an interview. “He left me no choice. At this point, I don’t know any way to resolve this except through the court system.”
In the misdemeanor case, the mother of Simmons’s child told police that during an argument Jan. 5, Simmons threatened to kill her, arrest information shows. The two argued after Simmons brought the child to her home on Clay Street NE because he blamed her for running out of diapers and clean clothes and found her dressed to go out to “a function,” court documents show.
Simmons left the home but later called back several times to continue the argument, and he reportedly said, “On my mother, I’m going to kill you,” the arrest affidavit said.
The woman called police, and during one of the conversations, she told investigators that responding officers overheard Simmons repeat the threat to kill her, court documents state.
A status hearing on the misdemeanor charge in that case is scheduled for March 13.