- Miss USA 2019 Cheslie Kryst’s new memoir, “By the Time You Read This,” was released Tuesday.
- Her mother, April Simpkins, helped finish the memoir after Kryst’s death in January 2022.
On the morning of January 30, 2022, April Simpkins received one last text from her daughter, former Miss USA Cheslie Kryst.
It’s a message Simpkins shares in Kryst’s memoir, “By the Time You Read This,” which she helped finish following her 30-year-old daughter’s death by suicide.
In the memoir, released on Tuesday, Simpkins recounted the painful day she received a text that read in part, “I’m sorry. By the time you get this, I won’t be alive anymore.”
“My brain couldn’t register the words on the screen,” she wrote. “I read them again and screamed from a place in my soul that I didn’t know existed. My hands started shaking, and I couldn’t catch my breath. This can’t be real. I need all of this to not be real, was all I could think.”
After she read the message, Simpkins said her husband called the police in New York City, where Kryst had moved after she was crowned Miss USA in May 2019.
“The police told us that medics were on-site, which was the sliver of hope I needed,” Simpkins wrote.
She said in the memoir that she booked their flights from South Carolina to New York and that they kept calling the police “again and again.”
“Every time they told us they didn’t have any updates, and medics were on-site,” Simpkins recalled. “We were all…
