Neglect susp told of car hit & abuse as kid
A BROOKLYN mom accused of leaving her daughter alone in a urine-soaked diaper and stomping on her son’s back shrugged off child-neglect claims and vowed Friday to get her family back.
“I would never do that to my kids,” Yasheameia Hamilton, 35, said after her arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court.
The aloof mom, who has lost custody of all four of her children, said she was confident she would be reunited with her kids eventually.
“It’s so much an exaggeration,” she said after being released without bail on charges of child endangerment and neglect. If anything, her children push her around, she said.
“I do too much for my babies. They run over me,” she said.
But in 2016, a worker at the public housing building where Hamilton lives told police that she saw Hamilton stomp on her son twice as the child bawled on the ground, and later noticed a footprint on the back of the boy’s coat, according to a criminal complaint.
On Thursday night, police found Hamilton’s four-month-old daughter left filthy, covered in rashes and alone in the apartment, wearing a dirty diaper, prosecutors charge.
Police said the kitchen countertop was crawling with roaches and clothing and chicken bones were scattered around the Batchelder St. apartment, near Avenue W in the Nostrand Houses.
Hamilton’s lawyer, William Ross, argued that his client has never been convicted of a crime and the child was not hurt.
“If my client had stomped a child, there would be injury,” he told the judge at her arraignment. Ross did acknowledge that Hamilton was seen with her foot on the child’s back.
Hamilton seemed upbeat after she was released on her own recognizance.
“That went real good,” she said. “It always goes great for me.”
But her life has mostly been defined by hardluck, as she wrote in an 2016 online essay in Rise magazine.
She was hit by a car at 9 and was sexually abused in the family home.
“For years, my mother’s boyfriend kept touching me,” she wrote. “These experiences made me feel like a target. As a little girl, I loved to talk about Jesus. But being molested made me feel unloved.”
Sources said Hamilton has a history of abuse and neglect and previously had four children taken from her by the city Administration for Children’s Services. ACS didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. In the essay, Hamilton wrote that she wanted to follow in her sister’s footsteps and graduate from high school.
But she fell into drinking and drugs because of her abuse.
“After that, my depression became powerful,” she wrote. “I felt homeless within myself.”
She wrote that she admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital and entered a substance abuse program in 2008 and began therapy.
“Therapy also showed me the difference between real love and sex, and helped me believe I could make friends,” she wrote.
Hamilton added, “I felt jealous and angry, like I was becoming a monster. Going to therapy helped to make my mind positive.”
She wrote that during her 20s, she became a mom but could not stop using drugs.
Her mother kicked her out of the house when she was 24, she said. She had a son and a daughter by age 25. The boy was placed in foster care and then went to live with her mother.
Friday she vowed to put her family back together.
“I’m going come to court for her,” she said. “I’m going to get my baby. I love my kids.”