Brooklyn prosecutors are investigating how a city agency so miserably failed a 4-year-old found beaten and starved to death in her drugggie mom’s filthy home.
Marchella Pierce, a sickly child who weighed just 18 pounds when she died last month, was being monitored by the Administration for Children’s Services.
The district attorney’s office will probe why caseworkers failed to visit the Pierce home, and the role of a private agency contracted by ACS last spring to help the family, said a law enforcement source.
It will also examine the circumstances of the child’s discharge from an upstate upstate pediatric nursing home, the source said.
Born prematurely and suffering from severe health problems, Pierce was released last February to the care of her mother, a known drug user, by Northwoods Health Systems, in upstate Niskayuna.
From that time, she was monitored by ACS, but caseworkers failed to visit her after June, three months before her Sept. 2 death.
The little girl’s mother, Carlotta Brett-Pierce, 30, lashed her daughter to a bed and beat her when the she tried to get a snack from a refrigerator just before she died, cops said.
Brett-Pierce has been charged with assault, reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child.
“Given the history of the Nixzmary Brown tragedy and the city’s failure to protect that child, I am sufficiently troubled by the death of this child that I want to find out why she died,” said Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes.
Nixmary Brown, a 7-year-old Brooklyn girl killed by her mother and stepfather four years ago, also was being monitored by ACS.
Probes found a massive lapse in care, reporting and followup by the agency and several caseworkers in her case, and led to a revamping of ACS.
Officials at Northwoods Health Systems, now known as Pathways, declined comment on Marchella’s care and how and why she was released to her mother.
Valerie Savidis, assistant administrator of Pathways, did say that “all records” on the child had been sent to both the Brooklyn district attorney’s office and ACS.
ACS Commissioner John Mattingly admitted Tuesday to “critical” missteps in Pierce’s case. An ACS caseworker and supervisor were suspended for the failures.
Mattingly told a City Council panel investigating the case that multiple warning signs were missed or ignored, including Brett-Pierce’s past hostilty to caseworkers, the woman’s failure to get drug treatment, and multiple missed followup visits.
Mattingly said ACS has since strengthened its preventive service programs and launched new recordkeeping procedures that require caseworkers to file handwritten and electronic reports.