It?s true that when Jeffrey Simon broke up with his girlfriend a few years ago, and his longtime friend started dating her, it didn?t exactly go over well.
So says Simon?s brother, William, who around midnight Tuesday stood in his driveway and watched a police officer place 49-year-old Jeffrey Simon under arrest. The old friend, Arthur Brown, had been fatally stabbed less than two miles away in a pickup truck, police said, as he sat between Simon and the woman.
“[He] used to be his best friend,” William Simon said. But while Jeffrey was angry at Brown when it happened, he said, more recently it seemed like history. “I ain?t heard him mention it in over two years.”
Police also had little to say about a possible motive for the murder, but said the three ? Jeffrey Simon, Brown and Brown?s fiancee, Mary Grubb ? were talking at about 11 p.m. in the pickup, parked in the 3000 block of Bero Road, when Simon pulled out a knife.
Grubb called police after the attack as Simon ran off, police said. Brown, 48, was pronounced dead shortly after 1 a.m. at St. Agnes Hospital and Simon was arrested in front of his brother?s house, without incident, on a first-degree murder charge. William Simon said his brother seemed fine earlier Tuesday when he came over to help fix a window.
William Simon said he was learning of the attack for the first time from a niece late that night when his brother knocked on the door.
“I told him, no, you can?t come in,” William Simon said. “He wanted to give my mom a hug and a kiss.”
So he let his brother embrace their 71-year-old mother, and walk to the backyard to say goodbye to the dog, before the officer came for him.
“I?ve just got questions. I want to know what happened from the time he left here” until his return late that night, William Simon said. “Something went wrong.”
