Get the children out
Surely it’s possible that the agonizing deaths of Ibanez and Scylee Ambrose, just 2 and 1, in a cloud of scalding steam in their Bronx apartment amounted to “an extraordinary and unprecedented accident,” as Mayor de Blasio summarily concluded after visiting the Hunts Point home on Thursday.
Investigators combing through the evidence will have to determine whether the mayor is wrong or right, right quick.
Yet to see the tragedy as mere coincidence would be to overlook city government’s role in putting the two little girls in harm’s way.
Ibanez, Scylee and their parents moved into the apartment over a year ago under the auspices of the city’s Department of Homeless Services, which paid a nonprofit organization to rent five apartments in the building from Moshe Piller.
Piller was a fixture on Public Advocate Letitia James’ “Worst Landlords” watchlist, where he landed for accumulating hundreds of hazardous housing code violations on his properties. His notoriety is nothing new: “The king of the slumlords,” the Daily News dubbed Piller in 2004.
None of that stopped Bushwick Economic Development Corp. from signing up Piller up to provide so-called cluster shelter housing, paid for by the Department of Homeless Services — apartments the city Department of Investigation last year found to be in widespread disrepair.
De Blasio knows just how profoundly unsuitable such slums are for homeless kids: Ending cluster shelters was one of his 2013 mayoral campaign promises. (And if they’re unsuitable for homeless kids, they’re unsuitable for all kids.)
But once at City Hall, he backpedaled — by default, perpetuating the slum system as the number of homeless families surged rather than risk attempting to open new homeless shelters in neighborhoods he feared would be hostile to them.
In fact, de Blasio’s homeless services agency put still more shoddy apartments into service as cluster sites. Kids have paid the price. Juan Sanchez, age 4, died in May 2014 in another Bronx cluster building, with rat poison left in the hallway suspected as the cause of his demise.
That de Blasio has since, as mayor, renewed his vow to stop using such slums as homeless shelters — and instituted a system of inspections and “repair scorecards” showing the status of each building — can’t rewrite the history now seared in place.
A city inspector visited the Ambrose apartment just two days before the deadly incident. What he or she saw and documented, and repaired or failed to, must be the focus of diligent internal investigation, with consequences.
So must Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark aggressively pursue an investigation of Piller’s management of the building turned furnace.
From tragedy, may the mayor now find a far better way forward, far faster than his three-year timeline for closing the door on cluster shelters.
It may well have been a freak accident that cost two little girls their lives. A series of deliberate human decisions put them in the room where the unspeakable tragedy happened.