In America: She was drugged, tied to a bed, died at 4

N R Kleinfield and Mosi Secret, The New York Times, Updated: May 09, 2011 08:57 IST

New York: She died in September by the ugliest means, weighing an unthinkable 18 pounds, half of what a 4-year-old ought to. She withered in poverty in a home in Brooklyn where the authorities said she had been drugged and often bound to a toddler bed by her mother, having realized a bare thimble's worth of living.

The horrid nature of Marchella Pierce's death produced four arrests. This week, Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, is convening a grand jury to explore what he called "evidence of alleged systemic failures" in New York City's child welfare agency, which had monitored the girl's family.

An examination of Marchella's bleak, fleeting life, drawn from interviews with relatives, neighbors and law enforcement authorities, as well as from legal documents, shows that almost nothing went right for her. She entered the world prematurely with underdeveloped lungs. When she was not in a hospital, she was being raised in the uproar of a helter-skelter, combative family struggling with drugs. And when she came under the watch of the city's Administration for Children's Services, an agency remade a number of times after child deaths, her well-being fell to caseworkers who, prosecutors say, essentially ignored the family.


.... The Verdict 
Marchella's mother, Carlotta Brett-Pierce, 31, is charged with murder, and her grandmother, Loretta Brett, 56, with manslaughter. Both are in jail awaiting trial. Damon Adams, 37, a Children's Services caseworker, and his supervisor, Chereece Bell, 34, are charged with criminally negligent homicide; it is thought to be the first time that city child welfare workers have been incriminated in a death. Prosecutors said that Mr. Adams had not made required visits to the family and lied about it, and that Ms. Bell had failed to supervise him. Both have left the agency.

FULL STORY

God only knows how many THOUSANDS more CPS agents need to be in prison for their Federal Capital Crimes (death penalty crimes)