Excerpt
A 4-year-old Brooklyn girl who weighed 18 pounds when she died in September appears to have gone months without a visit from child welfare workers assigned to monitor her well-being, despite indications that she could be at risk, New York’s child welfare agency revealed on Tuesday.
The agency offered a wrenching glimpse into the final months of the girl, Marchella Pierce, whose home care, it said, was “grossly inadequate.” It also found that her mother beat her with a videocassette case for punishment and tied her to a bed “for substantial periods of time.”
In a preliminary report released at a City Council hearing, the agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, provided its most detailed look yet at the events that preceded the death of Marchella, whose bruised and emaciated body was found in her family’s Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment on Sept. 2.
The report outlines a series of failures by the agency and a private provider that missed or ignored signals that the girl’s mother — who had a known history of substance abuse and who continued to fail drug tests even after the agency became involved with the family — seemed incapable of tending to her daughter’s serious medical needs.
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