You let him down Blaz ,
Little Zymere Perkins didn’t deserve to die. Our mayor repeatedly has vowed to fix the broken system that allows abused kids to remain in the hands of their killers. He has failed. Miserably.
THE MOTHER of a battered 6-year-old Harlem boy told investigators she watched her hulking boyfriend beat her son with a wooden broomstick and hang him by his Tshirt from a hook on the bathroom door. Then she placed her dead son on a bed and rested and read the Bible.
The infuriating and sickening details of little Zymere Perkins’ final moments emerged as city investigators launched a probe Wednesday into his death — trying to determine whether a series of past child-care failures sealed his tragic fate.
The Department of Investigation demanded the documents in five previous ACS probes of abuse involving Zymere’s mom after Mayor de Blasio admitted the system he had set out to reform had failed.
The child’s death Monday came two years after de Blasio vowed to reform the city’s Administration for Children’s Services and four months after a highly critical Investigation Department assessment of the troubled agency.
“The bottom line is something needed to be done differently here,” the mayor said. “That’s just 100% obvious. We have to figure out what happened. We need to figure out if it was a specific missed opportunity or something systemic that we have to fix.”
As both public advocate and mayor, de Blasio has sharply criticized ACS — issuing his strongest statement after the 2014 beating death of 4-year-old Myls Dobson.
“We can’t just stand by and mourn the losses, which are unbearable,” the mayor told the Daily News at the time. “We must do something about it.”
De Blasio instead found himself wondering what went wrong in the Perkins case. Zymere’s crime was apparently defecating into an ice bucket — setting off his mother’s boyfriend’s homicidal rage, according to authorities.
The boy’s mom, Geraldine Perkins, 26 (above right), told investigators she did nothing after watching her boyfriend beat the boy and hang him on the bathroom door.
She said Rysheim Smith (above left), 42, then left the apartment to get lunch.
Perkins lifted Zymere’s limp, bruised body from the back of the door and lay him on a bed in the couple’s roach-infested apartment before she “went to rest and read the Bible.” Zymere was dead for hours before his mom ran frantically from the building and took him to the hospital.
Perkins told cops she and Smith had both beaten Zymere in the past. The two were held on $50,000 bail at their arraignments Wednesday night on charges of endangering the welfare of a child.
Authorities were awaiting autopsy results before determining more serious charges. They are both due back in court Oct. 3.
Relatives of Geraldine Perkins, speaking outside a Manhattan courthouse, insisted she did not kill her son.
“She would never lift a hand to hurt her child or to hit him,” said the suspect’s aunt Rosemary Perkins. “That was not in Geraldine Perkins. Not in her body or her bones.”
Rosemary Perkins described Smith as “a monster” who beat both her niece and Zymere. A resident of the Harlem building where Zymere lived with his mom and Smith also painted an unflattering portrait of the boyfriend.
“I used to see him around,” said Raymond Santana, 51, as he stood near a memorial of candles and stuffed animals. “He was always asking people for money on the streets.”
Santana — who taped The News’ front page and story about Zymere to a wall outside the building — said he hoped Smith wound up spending the rest of his life behind bars.
De Blasio, the father of two kids, said word of Zymere’s tragic death affected him deeply as a parent.
“This one really troubles me,” the mayor said. “A lot of different people were aware of this case, tried hard to get down to the bottom of it.
“But we did not succeed in saving this child, which is unacceptable to me.”
The Department of Investigation specifically sought documents about whether ACS addressed serious problems contained in a May report detailing the agency’s bungling of two child fatalities and one near-death.
The agency’s “investigative failures, deficient casework (and) . . . lack of data collection” made it impossible to adequately track case histories, the report charged. It specifically questioned ACS’ policy of keeping a single caseworker on a single case, reasoning that any worker who cleared a family would be more inclined to reach the same conclusion in future probes.
The DOI also found that in 16% of ACS probes where caseworkers substantiated abuse or neglect allegations between 2013-15, the children became victims again.
According to DOI, ACS accepted and began implementing its recommendations — although DOI said it “continues to monitor this ongoing action.”
De Blasio compared Zymere’s death with the January 2006 killing of Nixzmary Brown, a 7-year-old beaten mercilessly with a belt by her father. The case led to an overhaul in the Administration for Children’s
Services.
De Blasio said he didn’t believe this was a case that fell through the cracks. “I don’t think that’s the problem here from what I know,” he said. “A lot of holes in the system in the past remain plugged. But we keep finding new things we have to address.”
Geraldine Perkins was investigated for possible child abuse on five occasions, beginning in June 2010. The latest questioning came just five months ago, when Zymere told a school worker the bruises on his leg occurred when a cousin whacked him with a scooter, a source told The News.
Later that day, Zymere told authorities his mom hit him in the head with a belt, the source said.
The mom was interviewed, denied hitting the boy, and the case was closed April 27 — 12 days after the probe began, the source said.
Smith’s rap sheet dates to 1999 and includes three arrests this year alone — the most recent a marijuana possession bust last month. He pleaded guilty in April 2008 to stealing a pair of laptop computers from an Upper West Side apartment, serving 90 days.
The couple lived in homeless shelters before moving to the filthy Harlem home where the boy died. According to a criminal complaint, the apartment “does not have electricity, has rotting food in the refrigerator, large amounts of mold, rust, and mildew in the bathroom, and is infested with cockroaches and other insects.”
Zymere was apparently not registered for school this year — but his absence went unnoticed.
We can’t just stand by and mourn the losses, which are unbearable. We must do something about it. — May 8, 2014, when de Blasio vowed to hire 362 new staffers and slash caseloads of key workers in half