MAYOR FAILED US
My son got lead poisoning thanks to Blaz & NYCHA
FOR ALL four years of his life — the same span of Mayor de Blasio’s first term in office — little Kyan Dickerson has lived in a public housing apartment where the paint carried the threat of lead poisoning.
Kyan’s mother, Sherron Paige, had no idea that her son — as a baby, a toddler and then a small boy — was at risk for exposure to the toxic metal until a routine medical test revealed an alarmingly high level in the child’s blood.
De Blasio is among those who concealed the danger from Sherron Paige.
When doctors revealed the test results to Paige in July, de Blasio had known for more than a year that NYCHA didn’t conduct required lead tests on thousands of apartments, yet he remained silent about the agency’s failure.
In violation of the law, NYCHA didn’t conduct lead tests in Paige’s building at the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn for five years.
And NYCHA failed to notify Paige and other tenants that, from 2013 to 2015, tests detected lead paint in 105 apartments in their complex, including in four units in the buildings next door to Paige’s.
Kyan has since been diagnosed as having delayed speech, a possible effect of lead poisoning. He gets frustrated when people don’t understand what he’s trying to say and he sometimes lashes out.
“He has little problems when he speaks,” his mom said. “He gets off-track fast. He’ll lose focus. They’ll be doing something (in pre-K), and he just walks away.”
For Paige, the mayor’s decision to hide the truth is infuriating.
“I’m mad that I voted for him,” she said. “If I had known about this, I wouldn’t have.”
On Tuesday evening, Kyan, who has the last name of his father, James Dickerson, ran around the apartment, clearly not ready for bedtime. Sitting at the kitchen table, his mom was still angry at her treatment by the city.
Back in July, Paige was at work as a NYCHA caretaker when her cell phone buzzed. It was the city Health Department calling to say Kyan had a blood-lead level of 12 micrograms per deciliter — well above the acceptable level of 5. Lead can cause brain damage in small children.
“I was aggravated when I found out,” Paige, 34, recalled. “It was to the point where I had to leave work.”
Paige is one of two Red Hook Houses mothers whose children were diagnosed with high bloodlead levels since April 2015, when senior managers at NYCHA realized the agency was not complying with a local law requiring annual inspections of units with children ages 6 and under.
Corey Stern, a lawyer for both parents, has filed suit against NYCHA. The other child, identified in the suit by the initials J.W., was 3 and living at 791 Hicks St. at the Red Hook Houses when his blood-lead level registered at 10.9 in December 2015.
Records obtained by The News show that at the time the two children got the frightening test results, NYCHA was well aware of the presence of lead paint in the Red Hook Houses.
From 2013 through 2015, lead paint was found in 105 Red Hook apartments, including four at 795 and 797 Hicks St. — right nextdoor to Paige’s building.
Yet NYCHA has not tested 791 Hicks St. for lead paint in the last five years. That failure is a violation of both local law and federal regulations.
While the lead paint in the apartments next-door was immediately abated, Paige’s apartment has yet to be fixed. That’s because NYCHA says its tests show there is no lead paint in her apartment.
Those findings, however, are contradicted by two tests by the city Health Department, which X-rayed the walls and heat pipes, and then checked dust samples found near the baseboards. Those tests turned up lead paint.
On Sunday, The News revealed that de Blasio had known about NYCHA’s lead paint inspection gaps for a year-and-a-half but didn’t tell the public.
He did so only after he was reelected Nov. 7 and the city Department of Investigation released a Nov. 14 report revealing that for several years, NYCHA has falsely claimed to be in compliance on inspections.
In admitting his “regrets” about not informing the public and tenants sooner de Blasio downplayed the problem. Between 2014 and 2016, he said, only four children in NYCHA apartments had elevated bloodlead levels.
Critics said the mayor cherrypicked his numbers.
In fact, records show that in the last seven years, 202 children living in 133 NYCHA apartments have tested positive for elevated bloodlead levels.
In those cases, city health inspectors found lead paint in 63 of those apartments (about half). But NYCHA did its own lab tests and claimed only 17 of those apartments tested positive for lead. NYCHA says the Health Department figures overstate the problem.
Some think NYCHA’s numbers are artificially low because of this pattern of contradiction between Health Department and NYCHA test results.
And they note that 55,000 NYCHA apartments — all built before 1958, when lead paint was in common use — are presumed to contain lead paint. Red Hook, for instance, was built in 1939.
Because of that, attorney Stern — who is seeking class-action status to sue on behalf of all NYCHA tenants — believes the numbers are much higher.
He notes that not all parents have their children tested, and that NYCHA doesn’t count children who spend multiple days staying with grandparents in NYCHA apartments.
“It’s really hard to imagine how the mayor can speak intelligently about the numbers,” he said. “The reality is that the mayor doesn’t know, and we don’t know.”