Angela Simmons ‘Hated’ That Her Son Learned of His Father's Murder Online Before She Could Tell Him

Angela Simmons wishes she had the chance to inform her now-8-year-old son about her father's passing before he took to the internet.

Simmons, who's currently dating Yo Gotti, was a recent guest on podcast Baby, This Is Keke Palmer, where she recalled the moment that her son, Sutton Joseph Jr., confronted her about the 2018 murder of his father, Sutton Tennyson. Before the end of his life, he and Simmons and were briefly engaged before splitting in 2017. At 37 years old, Tennyson was murdered just outside his garage in Atlanta. The shooter, Michael Williams, surrendered to police just days later and was charged with murder before being sentenced to life in prison in 2022, per TMZ.

Around the 24-minute mark of the video below, Simmons admitted that she struggled with "how to process" her ex-partner's murder and immediately sought therapy.

"I just never knew that would be me," Simmons told Palmer. "I mean his father's side of the family is absolutely supportive and amazing, and so that helps. And my family is so amazing, so that helped me a lot."

But after sharing her journey of being a single mother, Palmer asked Simmons about how she was able to explain Tennyson's murder to their son. While Simmons planned to have a conversation with Sutton once he turned 10, he found out the cause of his father's death online. While Simmons was at an event for her food brand Angela's Cakes, Sutton was with his paternal grandmother, who called Simmons and warned her that he was asking about his father.

"So he gets on the phone and he's bawling. He's like, 'I don't know why he's not here. But why would somebody shoot him?'" Simmons recalled. "The next day, he's like 'Someone murdered him?' And I'm like, 'What are you looking at, baby?' I'm like, 'You can't look online because there's too much online. I don't even know what you're even feeding [into].'"

She continued, "But I just hated that the internet told my son before I can tell him. [...] I was so bothered because he got the story and the narrative from online before I could even like sit him down and have that conversation."

Simmons added that when Sutton was 2 and 3, he would ask relatives about what happened to his father, but Simmons would tell her son that "a bad guy did something to him."

"How do you tell a kid that's three that what [happened]," Simmons said. "He kept asking and he would ask his grandmother separately and other people like, 'So what happened?' And he's only three so you got to imagine [a] three, four-year-old asking these questions, but we're like, 'He's not ready to hear this.'

Simmons' encouraged those with a deceased co-parent to "keep them alive," and mentioned showing her son pictures and sharing memories about Tennyson.

Simmons previously grieved Tennyson's death on a 2020 episode of Growing Up Hip Hop, where she shared that Sutton asked if his father was alive.

"For him to like ask that, it's like, 'Whoa, did you really just say is he alive? I was just like, 'No, he's not."

She continued, "This is the first time I'm having to explain it to him, which is super sad because he's three. How do you explain to a three-year-old that they're never gonna see them again?"

After Williams' sentencing, Simmons reportedly made an Instagram post that included her son, then 5 years old, with a caption that read, "Justice served today! We got you ! We got him."