Drowned boy, 9, visited beach without dad's OK

Published in the Asbury Park Press 8/20/03
By NANCY SHIELDS

COASTAL MONMOUTH BUREAU
ASBURY PARK -- Nine-year-old Simson Louis lived one block from the
city beach but did not know how to swim.

On Monday afternoon, he asked an older girl in his apartment
building at 210 Second Ave. to take him to the beach, according to
his father, Yves Louis. About 15 minutes after lifeguards at the
Third Avenue beach had cleared the water and gone off duty, a man
saw Simson's body in the surf. It was 5:15 p.m. A call went out to
police.

Attempts to revive Simson were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced
dead when medics arrived with him at Jersey Shore University Medical
Center in Neptune.

Yesterday, Yves Louis expressed anger and despair that anyone would
take his son, who came to the United States from Haiti on July 26,
2001, to the ocean without the family's permission.

"I don't want my son to go down there," said Louis, who works in
housekeeping at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New
Brunswick. "Why not say your parent is not here?"

Police Capt. Gilbert Reed said Simson went to the beach area with
three of his neighbors, aged 20, 17 and 7. The drowning is under
investigation.

Joe Bongiovanni, the city's beach safety supervisor, said lifeguards
at Third Avenue "definitely cleared the water, and everyone was out
when they left" at 5 p.m.

"It's a hard pill to swallow," Bongiovanni said. "Children or
adults -- they cannot go in the water when there is no protection."

Yves Louis also has three daughters older than Simson who live with
him. He came to the United States in 1997, said he could not accept
that his son drowned. He said that when he held Simson's body at the
hospital, his son did not look like a drowning victim. Louis is
waiting for autopsy results to be available today.

Simson would have been a fifth-grader this year at Thurgood Marshall
Elementary School where he's studied the past two years.

"We are saddened and extend our condolences to his family," School
Superintendent Antonio Lewis said yesterday. "Here is a young life
that's snuffed out. No doubt this young man had leadership abilities
and could have continued to be a tremendous addition to the school
family, the district and the town."

"He was very, very smart and could already speak English very well,"
Simson's father said, sitting in the family's living room where the
9-year-old slept on an upper bunk bed.

Louis said his son was very good on a computer set up in the living
room.

Simson's mother lives in Haiti and has not been able to move to
America, Louis said. She did not yet know yesterday afternoon that
Simson died on Monday because he was worried about how she would
react, Louis said.

"I have to find someone to tell her," he said.


Nancy Shields: (732) 643-4229 or shields@app.com