The Tribune

By LYNAIRE MUNNINGS

Tribune Staff Reporter

lmunnings@tribunemedia.net

HE told his mother he was coming home for Christmas. The next morning, 32-year-old Clevon “Boldy” Simmons was dead at Half Moon Cay, and his family cannot understand how a man who grew up swimming and who snorkelled with tourists for a living could have drowned.

His mother, Adrian Simmons, is being treated for stage-three breast cancer. Now she is mourning her son and demanding answers.

“People have to tell me how my child died,” she told The Tribune yesterday. “I need to know the story about how he died or why he died.”

Simmons, a Grand Bahama native, became unresponsive on Wednesday during an in-service training exercise at Half Moon Cay, Carnival’s private cruise island, also known as Little San Salvador. He had been working there for only about a week. Police are investigating a suspected drowning.

According to police, officers on Eleuthera were notified by officials at Half Moon Cay shortly before 9am that a man had become unresponsive during the exercise. Officers were sent to the island and directed to its medical clinic, where they were told Simmons had been taken for medical attention. Medical staff began advanced cardiac life support, but he could not be revived and was pronounced dead. An autopsy is expected to determine the cause of death.

His mother said the idea that he drowned makes no sense to her.

“My child was a big swimmer,” she said. “He used to swim in the canal. When the boys were young, they would go to the beach every Sunday and swim in the canal. He grew up around the water.”

“For them to tell me that my child drowned, I cannot understand that,” she said.

She said she had not been given a detailed explanation of what happened and understood the family would have to wait for the outcome of the police investigation.

Mother and son had spoken the night before. It was an ordinary call that ended the way their calls always did.

“Every time we ended our conversations, it was always, ‘I love you, Mommy,’” she said. “And I would tell him, ‘Boy, Mommy loves you too.’”

The next day, Ms Simmons was at work when her daughter called with the news. She said she and her son did not speak every day, but they checked on each other regularly, and she would call him whenever she had not heard from him.

Simmons had spent three to four years at Princess Cays, the Carnival-owned resort at the southern tip of Eleuthera, taking tourists snorkelling. His mother said that when the resort was preparing to close, he was offered a choice: transfer to Half Moon Cay or go home to Grand Bahama to work at Celebration Key, Carnival’s cruise destination there. He chose Half Moon Cay. She said he loved his job and was never afraid of the water.

Princess Cruises has dropped Princess Cays from its published itineraries from this month, sending most of those calls to Half Moon Cay instead. Carnival Corporation, which owns both destinations, has not announced that the resort is closing and recently opened it to other cruise lines.

Asked how she was coping with her son’s death on top of her own illness, Ms Simmons said: “I’m taking it easy. I’m taking it one day at a time.”

She said she had been diagnosed last year, “but God is good. He’s in control.”

The middle of three children, Simmons had no children of his own, though his mother said he had wanted one.

“He was a sweetheart,” she said. “He was my dancing king. He loved to dance, he loved people, and he was always smiling.”

“I tell people, you see my child’s teeth before you see him because he was dark and had such white teeth,” she said. “He loved to smile. You would see his smile before anything else.”

His cousin and god-sister, Wynette McPhee, knew his mother before he was born and grew up with him as a sister.

“He was family-oriented,” she said. “He was the life of the party. He was loving, caring and just that guy everybody loves. I have never met one person who had a problem with him. In his 32 years, we have never had an argument.”

Ms McPhee was at work when a friend called to tell her he had died. She rang her aunt, who confirmed it.

“I was just trying to figure out what went wrong because he was one of the best swimmers I knew,” she said. “I remember our childhood. Even when he was younger than me, he was always the one jumping into the canal and jumping into the sea.”

When her own brother went missing and she became hysterical, she said, Simmons stepped in.

“He told me, ‘Boy, because you don’t have a brother no more, I’m your brother now,’” she said. “I held on to that.”

It was Ms McPhee’s father who gave him his nickname.

“He may have been about five or six months old when he got his first haircut,” she said. “Because he was so young, my father started calling him Mr Boldy, and the name stuck. He eventually started calling himself that.”