Mayor de Blasio identified a handful of changes to child protective services practices Friday in the wake of the brutal death of a 4-year-old boy at a midtown Manhattan apartment.
The initiatives – which include requiring families to attend a hearing before court-ordered supervision ends, and improving city access to online arrest databases – stemmed from a preliminary investigation by the Administration for Children’s Services.
The mayor also ordered a review of the roughly 3,200 current court-ordered supervision cases, and announced a pending public awareness campaign to encourage the reporting of suspected abuse.
“What we have found so far certainly shows us areas of improvements that we need to act on,” de Blasio said at a press conference at City Hall. “The agency’s duties, and our duties, are to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
Four-year-old Myls Dobson was found bruised and unconscious – and later died – on Jan. 8 in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment of Kryzie King.
The 27-year-old transgendered performer was indicted for assault and other charges Wednesday after allegedly confessing to brutalizing the boy. She was dating Myls’s father Wade Okee, who was jailed in New Jersey at the time on a fraud charge.
Officials said there was no mechanism for ACS – which had kept an eye on the toddler from May 2012 through August 2013 – to be notified that his primary caregiver had been locked up.
The preliminary review noted that Okee had also been jailed from September 2012 to February 2013 without the knowledge of ACS – despite home visits, a failure the changes aim to address.
“Should we have done something differently?” asked ACS Commissioner Gladys Carrion. “Yes, we should have.”