LilMtnCbn
06-22-2004, 06:39 AM
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/newyork/politics/nyc-home0622,0,309548
3.story?coll=nyc-manheadlines-politics
Children who died homeless
By Stephanie Saul
Staff Writer
June 21, 2004
Last year, the city lost track of a couple with a history of seriously
neglecting three of their children.
Child welfare workers finally found the couple, living in a city shelter, but
it was too late: Social workers discovered them only when their youngest son --
the last one still in their custody -- was electrocuted in their room at the
Bronx shelter.
The Nov. 7, 2003, death occurred when the 5-month-old baby rolled onto a live
wire that his father was trying to connect to a CD player, according to state
and city reports obtained by Newsday.
The remorseful father admitted that he had used marijuana daily, including the
day his son died.
A state report criticized the city for not looking hard enough for the family,
who had been hiding in plain sight.
Perhaps more than any other death, the boy's electrocution at the City Homes
University shelter illustrates how the multiagency system designed to protect
shelter children is plagued by poor coordination, with one part of the
bureaucracy sometimes unaware of what the other parts are doing.
"Often, the people who should be told, are not told," said Douglas Besharov, an
American Enterprise Institute scholar who serves on an independent city
fatality review panel that raised concerns last year about children dying in
shelters.
Newsday recently examined the deaths of 29 homeless children since 2000, most
of them in shelters. Here are the stories of two other deaths that might have
been prevented, according to Newsday findings and official reports.
Sade Hathaway's short life
She weighed in with a vigorous cry, a hearty appetite and a life expectancy of
about 78 years.
She died two months later in a Manhattan homeless shelter, a shrunken shell of
an infant.
In the brief weeks of Sade Faith Hathaway's life, there were warning signs that
something was amiss. But no one sounded the alarm before Feb. 5, 2002, the day
Sade's lifeless body was carried away in an ambulance.
An autopsy showed Sade weighed only 10 pounds -- one ounce more than the day
she was born. Her eyes were sunken into her skull. Her skin had lost its
elasticity. While the cause of death never was established conclusively, the
medical examiner said Sade was malnourished and dehydrated.
Since her death, two reports have raised questions about the city's handling of
Sade's case.
The state Office of Children and Family Services, which investigates child
fatalities, indicated that shelter staff should have notified Administration
for Children's Services authorities or contacted a state abuse hotline to
report that Sade's mother appeared to be neglecting her.
The mother, who was charged with child endangerment in Sade's death, had a
history of neglecting another child. Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, meantime,
labeled Sade's death "preventable" and criticized the shelter staff for not
reporting the neglect or checking into her mother's background.
"If either of these actions had been taken, the mother would have been
reintroduced to the ACS system and her previous report would have identified
the family as requiring preventive services or some other intervention to
provide for the safety of the child," Gotbaum said.
Sade Hathaway's death bears many similarities to the death last month of
Colesvintong Florestal, who was 3 months old when he died, allegedly of abuse
and neglect, at the Hamilton Place homeless shelter in Harlem.
Both children's mothers had previously been accused of neglecting a child and
both lost custody of that child.
And, in both cases, it appears that shelter workers were not aware of the
mother's history of neglect.
Sade's mother, Michelle Manuel, had come to the attention of the Administration
for Children's Services in 1996 when someone complained that another infant
daughter was provided with inadequate food, clothing, shelter, and suffered
from malnutrition, according to the state report, which does not identify her
by name.
The 6-month old baby was placed in foster care and freed for adoption in 1997.
Because she no longer had a child, Manuel was no longer being monitored by ACS
when she became pregnant in 2001, gave birth, and was referred to a shelter at
4 E. 28th St. The Red Cross was operating the shelter at that time but declined
to comment on the case, referring calls to the Department of Homeless Services.
That agency, along with ACS, has defended city efforts to protect children
living in shelters.
After moving to the shelter, Manuel took several steps that placed her daughter
in jeopardy, according to the state report. She removed a crib from her room
and, instead, allowed the baby to share her bed.
The reason, she later told authorities, was that she feared mice would enter
the baby's crib, the report said. But the practice of bed-sharing is
discouraged because it places infants at risk of being smothered when their
sleeping parents roll over.
She reduced the number of feedings recommended by her baby's doctor, from four
ounces six to eight times a day to four ounces four times a day. Manuel said
she thought that was better for the baby, according to the report and Manhattan
Criminal Court records.
Without checking with her pediatrician, she began to give the baby Dimetapp for
congestion.
But the most obvious sign that something was wrong came the day before Sade
died.
Twice on that day, shelter workers found Sade alone. The first time, she was in
her carriage in the lobby. The second time, she was alone in her room, with her
mother nowhere to be found. Manuel told authorities said she had gone across
the street to get a bagel.
As "mandated reporters," shelter workers should have immediately contacted ACS
or called a state child abuse hotline. The next morning, Michelle Manuel said
she awoke and found Sade not breathing.
She was buried in a white casket decorated with white stars. A police detective
who investigated the case attended her Harlem funeral, but Michelle Manuel did
not. She was incarcerated at Riker's Island.
She later pleaded guilty to child endangerment, a misdemeanor, and was released
on probation. Efforts to reach Manuel through relatives were unsuccessful.
Nobody heeded the warning
Da'jhanae Davis was 4 years old when she was scalded to death by 190-degree
bathtub water, 60 degrees over the city's legal limit. While some of the facts
of her death are in dispute, two things are clear: It was preventable, and was
due in part to the conditions at the homeless shelter where she lived.
Three months before Da'jhanae died, a shelter caseworker warned about scalding
water in the complex where the shelter is located. Another shelter child had
been severely burned and many tenants had complained they couldn't control the
water temperature, according to a city report viewed by Newsday.
No one fixed it until it was too late.
Still, when the books were closed on Da'jhanae's case, neither the shelter nor
the city was blamed.
Da'jhanae's mother pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide. Authorities
said it was a case of fatal child abuse, that she had placed her daughter in
the tub of scalding water. Her lawyer insisted it was a tragic accident.
It happened at the Vanderveer Estates, then a notoriously rundown apartment
complex in East Flatbush. Faced with an exploding population of homeless
families, the city had agreed in 2001 to rent apartments in the sprawling
59-building complex for clients in a program called Sunshine Scatter Sites.
What happened to one of the families placed there could have served as a
warning, months before Da'jhanae's death. Keisha Lee and her five children had
few complaints about their apartment But just after 6 a.m. on Nov. 14, 2001, as
her 11-year-old son, Ronald was taking a shower, his mother heard an explosion.
Keisha Lee ran to the bathroom, she recalled recently.
As her son emerged from the shower, concern turned to horror as she saw skin
peeling off the back of Ronald's leg. The shower head had blown off, spewing
what seemed to the boy like boiling water. She wrapped up her son and rushed
him to Lutheran Medical Center. Doctors at Staten Island University Hospital's
burn unit, where Ronald was transferred, found a "deep second-degree scald burn
to the left posterior knee."
The water was so hot, said Keisha Lee, that "you could boil tea in it."
Sunshine Scatter Site caseworker Maria Perez wrote an incident report about
Ronald Lee's hospitalization, as required by the city's Department of Homeless
Services.
The caseworker attached a note: "Management has been working on the boilers and
the regulator was defective. Other tenants (non-Sunshine clients) were also
burned with the hot water. We do not know the severity of the burns."
Many burn experts recommend that hot water heaters be set to a maximum of 120
degrees. The city code prohibits household water above 130 degrees.
At 140 degrees, skin burns within five seconds. At 180 degrees, the temperature
of very hot coffee, skin burns instantly. By the time Ronald Lee was
hospitalized, Tarajee Davis and her four children had already moved into a
different building at the Sunshine Scatter Site apartments at the Vanderveer.
The Davises had come to Vanderveer Estates in May 2001 after city marshals
evicted them from their Harlem apartment. "I understood I had to pay the rent,"
said Tarajee Davis, Da'jhanae's mother. "I didn't have it to pay."
Her eviction capped a decade of struggles for Davis since she had her first
child at 18. In that time, the city's Administration for Children's Services
had investigated five complaints relating to the children, records show.
The complaints, most of them unsubstantiated, ranged from allegations that one
of the children came to school inappropriately dressed, to claims that the
family's apartment was poorly kept, to allegations of excessive punishment.
But Davis viewed the Vanderveer as a new beginning. Outfitted with pots and
pans, linens, and even cable TV, it seemed like a home. Her children had no
idea it was a shelter.
Davis even enrolled in school. "I was trying to make things work," she said
recently.
Caseworker Maria Perez visited her regularly to see that things were going
well. She later wrote that she felt that Tarajee Davis was a good mother.
There remain conflicting accounts about exactly what occurred on Feb. 3, 2002,
the morning Da'jhanae was rushed to the hospital. At first, doctors said Davis'
account of the incident was plausible.
Davis said that, after bathing her two older boys, she left Da'jhanae in the
bathroom to change her baby's diaper in the living room of her two-bedroom
apartment.
While Davis was away, Da'jhanae had somehow been burned by the scalding hot
water, Davis said. Her brother told police he heard his sister's scream, then
ran into the living room, where he saw Da'jhanae with skin falling off her
body.
Interviewed at Cornell Medical Center's burn unit, Da'jhanae, shivering,
wrapped in full body bandages and in obvious pain, told investigators she had
gotten into the bathtub and turned on the water herself.
A treating physician said the burn marks appeared to be splash burns from a
shower. Authorities who interviewed the family members decided it was a case of
neglect, but not criminal behavior. They declined to prosecute. Davis' other
children, meanwhile, had been placed in the custody of a relative.
Shelter caseworker Perez, meanwhile, was frustrated over the management's
failure to repair the hot water at the Sunshine Scatter Site.
In a Feb. 6 letter to superiors, she noted that Da'jhanae's scalding was the
second such episode and complained, "Management has not been able to give me a
direct answer to my questions. They stated that the matter has to be
investigated further," she wrote.
That same day, the Administration for Children's Services checked with the
shelter's management, who reported that the hot water had been gauged at 190
degrees, according to the state report, prepared by the Office of Children and
Family Services.
Da'jhanae Davis died at the hospital on Feb. 23 from an infection that resulted
from her scalding.
A medical examiner concluded that the the girl's burn pattern indicated that
Da'jhanae had been "dunked," or intentionally placed in the water. The finding
contradicted what a treating physician had determined. Investigators also
focused on a remark the girl made to a hospital nurse on Feb. 15, 12 days after
she was scalded.
A notation in her chart by the nurse said the girl stated: "I got in trouble
yesterday. My mommy put me in the bathtub."
But Darren Fields, the lawyer representing Davis, said the remark was
ambiguous.
On March 26, 2002, a month after Da'jhanae died, a field worker for the
Administration for Children's Services contacted the Sunshine Scatter Site to
determine whether the water had been repaired.
"Shelter management reported that the valve in the boiler was fixed in late
February or early March, however, management would not disclose further
information due to legal considerations," a report said.
A member of shelter management team, Director of Social Services Riquelma
Moreno, recently said the shelter, which leases space from a building
management company, was not to blame.
"When it comes to the hot water, how the hot water comes out, I don't think I
can be responsible," said Moreno.
She laid the responsiblity, instead, on the complex's management.
At the time of the scalding incidents, the Vanderveer was under court
receivership following a bankruptcy largely due to 10,000 code violations.
Since then, the building has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Employees
Pension System.
The buildings where the Davises and Lees lived were served by separate boiler
plants in the complex, according to Chris Edwards, vice president for Emmes
Asset Management, which runs the complex for the LA employees.
Edwards said boilers throughout the complex had been poorly maintained before
the new owners took over.
"It's horrible what happened," said Edwards, vice president for Emmes Asset
Management, the new management company, who said the complex is getting $17
million in repairs to its heat and hot water systems, elevators, roofs, and
doors.
Caseworker Maria Perez, meanwhile, said she always expected to be called to
court to tell what she knew about the case. She never received that call.
-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
3.story?coll=nyc-manheadlines-politics
Children who died homeless
By Stephanie Saul
Staff Writer
June 21, 2004
Last year, the city lost track of a couple with a history of seriously
neglecting three of their children.
Child welfare workers finally found the couple, living in a city shelter, but
it was too late: Social workers discovered them only when their youngest son --
the last one still in their custody -- was electrocuted in their room at the
Bronx shelter.
The Nov. 7, 2003, death occurred when the 5-month-old baby rolled onto a live
wire that his father was trying to connect to a CD player, according to state
and city reports obtained by Newsday.
The remorseful father admitted that he had used marijuana daily, including the
day his son died.
A state report criticized the city for not looking hard enough for the family,
who had been hiding in plain sight.
Perhaps more than any other death, the boy's electrocution at the City Homes
University shelter illustrates how the multiagency system designed to protect
shelter children is plagued by poor coordination, with one part of the
bureaucracy sometimes unaware of what the other parts are doing.
"Often, the people who should be told, are not told," said Douglas Besharov, an
American Enterprise Institute scholar who serves on an independent city
fatality review panel that raised concerns last year about children dying in
shelters.
Newsday recently examined the deaths of 29 homeless children since 2000, most
of them in shelters. Here are the stories of two other deaths that might have
been prevented, according to Newsday findings and official reports.
Sade Hathaway's short life
She weighed in with a vigorous cry, a hearty appetite and a life expectancy of
about 78 years.
She died two months later in a Manhattan homeless shelter, a shrunken shell of
an infant.
In the brief weeks of Sade Faith Hathaway's life, there were warning signs that
something was amiss. But no one sounded the alarm before Feb. 5, 2002, the day
Sade's lifeless body was carried away in an ambulance.
An autopsy showed Sade weighed only 10 pounds -- one ounce more than the day
she was born. Her eyes were sunken into her skull. Her skin had lost its
elasticity. While the cause of death never was established conclusively, the
medical examiner said Sade was malnourished and dehydrated.
Since her death, two reports have raised questions about the city's handling of
Sade's case.
The state Office of Children and Family Services, which investigates child
fatalities, indicated that shelter staff should have notified Administration
for Children's Services authorities or contacted a state abuse hotline to
report that Sade's mother appeared to be neglecting her.
The mother, who was charged with child endangerment in Sade's death, had a
history of neglecting another child. Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, meantime,
labeled Sade's death "preventable" and criticized the shelter staff for not
reporting the neglect or checking into her mother's background.
"If either of these actions had been taken, the mother would have been
reintroduced to the ACS system and her previous report would have identified
the family as requiring preventive services or some other intervention to
provide for the safety of the child," Gotbaum said.
Sade Hathaway's death bears many similarities to the death last month of
Colesvintong Florestal, who was 3 months old when he died, allegedly of abuse
and neglect, at the Hamilton Place homeless shelter in Harlem.
Both children's mothers had previously been accused of neglecting a child and
both lost custody of that child.
And, in both cases, it appears that shelter workers were not aware of the
mother's history of neglect.
Sade's mother, Michelle Manuel, had come to the attention of the Administration
for Children's Services in 1996 when someone complained that another infant
daughter was provided with inadequate food, clothing, shelter, and suffered
from malnutrition, according to the state report, which does not identify her
by name.
The 6-month old baby was placed in foster care and freed for adoption in 1997.
Because she no longer had a child, Manuel was no longer being monitored by ACS
when she became pregnant in 2001, gave birth, and was referred to a shelter at
4 E. 28th St. The Red Cross was operating the shelter at that time but declined
to comment on the case, referring calls to the Department of Homeless Services.
That agency, along with ACS, has defended city efforts to protect children
living in shelters.
After moving to the shelter, Manuel took several steps that placed her daughter
in jeopardy, according to the state report. She removed a crib from her room
and, instead, allowed the baby to share her bed.
The reason, she later told authorities, was that she feared mice would enter
the baby's crib, the report said. But the practice of bed-sharing is
discouraged because it places infants at risk of being smothered when their
sleeping parents roll over.
She reduced the number of feedings recommended by her baby's doctor, from four
ounces six to eight times a day to four ounces four times a day. Manuel said
she thought that was better for the baby, according to the report and Manhattan
Criminal Court records.
Without checking with her pediatrician, she began to give the baby Dimetapp for
congestion.
But the most obvious sign that something was wrong came the day before Sade
died.
Twice on that day, shelter workers found Sade alone. The first time, she was in
her carriage in the lobby. The second time, she was alone in her room, with her
mother nowhere to be found. Manuel told authorities said she had gone across
the street to get a bagel.
As "mandated reporters," shelter workers should have immediately contacted ACS
or called a state child abuse hotline. The next morning, Michelle Manuel said
she awoke and found Sade not breathing.
She was buried in a white casket decorated with white stars. A police detective
who investigated the case attended her Harlem funeral, but Michelle Manuel did
not. She was incarcerated at Riker's Island.
She later pleaded guilty to child endangerment, a misdemeanor, and was released
on probation. Efforts to reach Manuel through relatives were unsuccessful.
Nobody heeded the warning
Da'jhanae Davis was 4 years old when she was scalded to death by 190-degree
bathtub water, 60 degrees over the city's legal limit. While some of the facts
of her death are in dispute, two things are clear: It was preventable, and was
due in part to the conditions at the homeless shelter where she lived.
Three months before Da'jhanae died, a shelter caseworker warned about scalding
water in the complex where the shelter is located. Another shelter child had
been severely burned and many tenants had complained they couldn't control the
water temperature, according to a city report viewed by Newsday.
No one fixed it until it was too late.
Still, when the books were closed on Da'jhanae's case, neither the shelter nor
the city was blamed.
Da'jhanae's mother pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide. Authorities
said it was a case of fatal child abuse, that she had placed her daughter in
the tub of scalding water. Her lawyer insisted it was a tragic accident.
It happened at the Vanderveer Estates, then a notoriously rundown apartment
complex in East Flatbush. Faced with an exploding population of homeless
families, the city had agreed in 2001 to rent apartments in the sprawling
59-building complex for clients in a program called Sunshine Scatter Sites.
What happened to one of the families placed there could have served as a
warning, months before Da'jhanae's death. Keisha Lee and her five children had
few complaints about their apartment But just after 6 a.m. on Nov. 14, 2001, as
her 11-year-old son, Ronald was taking a shower, his mother heard an explosion.
Keisha Lee ran to the bathroom, she recalled recently.
As her son emerged from the shower, concern turned to horror as she saw skin
peeling off the back of Ronald's leg. The shower head had blown off, spewing
what seemed to the boy like boiling water. She wrapped up her son and rushed
him to Lutheran Medical Center. Doctors at Staten Island University Hospital's
burn unit, where Ronald was transferred, found a "deep second-degree scald burn
to the left posterior knee."
The water was so hot, said Keisha Lee, that "you could boil tea in it."
Sunshine Scatter Site caseworker Maria Perez wrote an incident report about
Ronald Lee's hospitalization, as required by the city's Department of Homeless
Services.
The caseworker attached a note: "Management has been working on the boilers and
the regulator was defective. Other tenants (non-Sunshine clients) were also
burned with the hot water. We do not know the severity of the burns."
Many burn experts recommend that hot water heaters be set to a maximum of 120
degrees. The city code prohibits household water above 130 degrees.
At 140 degrees, skin burns within five seconds. At 180 degrees, the temperature
of very hot coffee, skin burns instantly. By the time Ronald Lee was
hospitalized, Tarajee Davis and her four children had already moved into a
different building at the Sunshine Scatter Site apartments at the Vanderveer.
The Davises had come to Vanderveer Estates in May 2001 after city marshals
evicted them from their Harlem apartment. "I understood I had to pay the rent,"
said Tarajee Davis, Da'jhanae's mother. "I didn't have it to pay."
Her eviction capped a decade of struggles for Davis since she had her first
child at 18. In that time, the city's Administration for Children's Services
had investigated five complaints relating to the children, records show.
The complaints, most of them unsubstantiated, ranged from allegations that one
of the children came to school inappropriately dressed, to claims that the
family's apartment was poorly kept, to allegations of excessive punishment.
But Davis viewed the Vanderveer as a new beginning. Outfitted with pots and
pans, linens, and even cable TV, it seemed like a home. Her children had no
idea it was a shelter.
Davis even enrolled in school. "I was trying to make things work," she said
recently.
Caseworker Maria Perez visited her regularly to see that things were going
well. She later wrote that she felt that Tarajee Davis was a good mother.
There remain conflicting accounts about exactly what occurred on Feb. 3, 2002,
the morning Da'jhanae was rushed to the hospital. At first, doctors said Davis'
account of the incident was plausible.
Davis said that, after bathing her two older boys, she left Da'jhanae in the
bathroom to change her baby's diaper in the living room of her two-bedroom
apartment.
While Davis was away, Da'jhanae had somehow been burned by the scalding hot
water, Davis said. Her brother told police he heard his sister's scream, then
ran into the living room, where he saw Da'jhanae with skin falling off her
body.
Interviewed at Cornell Medical Center's burn unit, Da'jhanae, shivering,
wrapped in full body bandages and in obvious pain, told investigators she had
gotten into the bathtub and turned on the water herself.
A treating physician said the burn marks appeared to be splash burns from a
shower. Authorities who interviewed the family members decided it was a case of
neglect, but not criminal behavior. They declined to prosecute. Davis' other
children, meanwhile, had been placed in the custody of a relative.
Shelter caseworker Perez, meanwhile, was frustrated over the management's
failure to repair the hot water at the Sunshine Scatter Site.
In a Feb. 6 letter to superiors, she noted that Da'jhanae's scalding was the
second such episode and complained, "Management has not been able to give me a
direct answer to my questions. They stated that the matter has to be
investigated further," she wrote.
That same day, the Administration for Children's Services checked with the
shelter's management, who reported that the hot water had been gauged at 190
degrees, according to the state report, prepared by the Office of Children and
Family Services.
Da'jhanae Davis died at the hospital on Feb. 23 from an infection that resulted
from her scalding.
A medical examiner concluded that the the girl's burn pattern indicated that
Da'jhanae had been "dunked," or intentionally placed in the water. The finding
contradicted what a treating physician had determined. Investigators also
focused on a remark the girl made to a hospital nurse on Feb. 15, 12 days after
she was scalded.
A notation in her chart by the nurse said the girl stated: "I got in trouble
yesterday. My mommy put me in the bathtub."
But Darren Fields, the lawyer representing Davis, said the remark was
ambiguous.
On March 26, 2002, a month after Da'jhanae died, a field worker for the
Administration for Children's Services contacted the Sunshine Scatter Site to
determine whether the water had been repaired.
"Shelter management reported that the valve in the boiler was fixed in late
February or early March, however, management would not disclose further
information due to legal considerations," a report said.
A member of shelter management team, Director of Social Services Riquelma
Moreno, recently said the shelter, which leases space from a building
management company, was not to blame.
"When it comes to the hot water, how the hot water comes out, I don't think I
can be responsible," said Moreno.
She laid the responsiblity, instead, on the complex's management.
At the time of the scalding incidents, the Vanderveer was under court
receivership following a bankruptcy largely due to 10,000 code violations.
Since then, the building has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Employees
Pension System.
The buildings where the Davises and Lees lived were served by separate boiler
plants in the complex, according to Chris Edwards, vice president for Emmes
Asset Management, which runs the complex for the LA employees.
Edwards said boilers throughout the complex had been poorly maintained before
the new owners took over.
"It's horrible what happened," said Edwards, vice president for Emmes Asset
Management, the new management company, who said the complex is getting $17
million in repairs to its heat and hot water systems, elevators, roofs, and
doors.
Caseworker Maria Perez, meanwhile, said she always expected to be called to
court to tell what she knew about the case. She never received that call.
-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
