NYCHA’S TOXIC LIES GROW WORSE

ma’s name forged for bogus inspection Kids poisoned in apts. said to be ‘clean’

AFTER CELEBRATING the birth of twin daughters in 2001, Juana Bison feared the peeling and chipped paint in her 46-year-old Cypress Hills Houses apartment contained lead — so she asked NYCHA to fix it.

A document soon made its way into a city Housing Authority file stating that an inspection of her Brooklyn apartment found no paint hazard. The document was signed by Juana Bison. Only it wasn’t. It appears a NYCHA worker forged her signature to make it appear as if Bison had signed off on an inspection that never happened.

Months after that tainted document was filed, Bison’s fears became reality when she brought her daughters in for a checkup on their second birthday.

One of the twins was fine, but the other — whose initials are Y.M. — registered a dangerously high blood-lead level of 20 micrograms per deciliter.

That’s five times the level deemed acceptable by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. High levels of blood lead can cause developmental delays in young children.

After Y.M.’s doctors reported the disturbing test results to the city Health Department, inspectors showed up and — not surprisingly — found lead paint on pipes in the kitchen and bathroom.

The poisoning — revealed in a lawsuit that netted the family a $240,000 settlement — illustrated a disturbing pattern of deception that has undermined the Housing Authority’s ability to combat the scourge of lead paint in thousands of decades-old apartments citywide.

NYCHA management has recently been excoriated for lying about performing required inspections and using untrained, uncertified workers on inspections that were performed.

But a new investigation by the Daily News has found the failures go even deeper: In many instances, lead paint has been found in apartments NYCHA had earlier declared lead-free, court documents and city filings show.

In fact, The News found NYCHA’s problems tracking which apartments actually have lead go back decades, and the agency has yet to obtain an accurate inventory of its lead-paint problem.

After periodic cleanups, NYCHA now estimates 55,000 of its 172,000 apartments likely have lead paint. That includes thousands that house children under 6 — those most vulnerable to the pernicious effects of lead paint.

But even those numbers are questionable.

In 2016, NYCHA said there were 4,200 units with young children and presumed lead paint that the authority was in the process of inspecting. But in December, NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye suddenly announced she had changed the number to 8,900 “out of an abundance of caution.”

Thousands of apartments, she now admitted, may have been improperly exempted from inspections. That included entire developments where a random sampling of units recorded negative results for lead paint in the 1990s.

Some of those negative results, it now appears, weren’t so negative.

Last month tenant Devon Hunt complained about peeling paint in her Ingersoll Houses apartment in Brooklyn, worried that it contained lead that could harm her three boys, ages 2, 3 and 4.

In response, Brian Honan, a top NYCHA manager, “told me that all lead was removed from Ingersoll Houses and so my unit would not be inspected,” she recounted.

Honan said this because Ingersoll was one of the developments subjected to the random sample tests in the 1990s. As a result, the entire development was declared “lead-free,” NYCHA officials said.

Two days after Honan told Hunt lead was gone from Ingersoll, state health inspectors showed up at the request of Gov. Cuomo and found lead paint dust in the living room, kitchen, hallway and two bedrooms — including one where her children slept.

In fact, The News discovered the state last month found lead paint in two other developments — Berry Houses in Staten Island and Queensbridge South in Long Island City — that had been deemed “lead-free” and exempted from inspections years ago.

The lead levels in the Ingersoll and Queensbridge apartments were below 40 micrograms of lead per square foot, the level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency deems hazardous.

But the level of lead in “leadfree” Berry was 72 — nearly twice the acceptable level. And the state found levels as high as 320 on the bedroom floor of a South

Jamaica II Houses apartment in Queens.

In that same South Jamaica building, NYCHA found lead in response to a tenant complaint back in 2013. They cleaned up the apartment, but a few months later the Health Department got a positive reading for lead in the same unit.

In fact, NYCHA and Health Department findings often contradict each other.

A March 2013 tenant complaint in the Drew-Hamilton Houses in Harlem resulted in a negative finding by NYCHA. A month later city health inspectors recorded a positive reading for lead in the same unit. Though NYCHA insisted there was no lead, they cleaned the unit anyway, records show.

The agency has a history of performing cleanups that don’t actually clean up the danger. The News found multiple examples where tenants moved into apartments they’ve been told were cleaned but where tests later revealed lead.

NYCHA claimed Sherron Paige’s apartment received a lead paint “correction” before she moved in in 2012, but in 2017 her son, Kyan Dickerson, tested positive for an elevated blood-lead level of 12 micrograms. Days later, health inspectors found lead paint there.

In the case of Juana Bison, the misinformation appears to be a forged signature.

In 2001, after her daughters were born, Bison’s apartment had water leaks behind the bathroom and kitchen walls that were eating away at the plaster and paint.

She says she asked NYCHA to fix the problems, fearing that the paint contained lead and her infants would ingest it. She said NYCHA did not respond to her concerns.

But a Feb. 10, 2003, document in NYCHA’s files raised a disturbing question: Was a tenant signature forged to falsely claim NYCHA had found no paint issue?

On the “Apartment Inspection” form, a NYCHA worker checked off a list of issues as “OK.” That included “paint/paint chips.”

At the bottom of the form there is no worker signature, but there is what purports to be a tenant signature: “J Bison.”

It is not Bison’s signature. Numerous other NYCHA documents record an entirely different and consistent signature that is actually hers.

Bison’s attorney, James De Norscia of Marder Eskesen & Nass, said after the apparently fictional Feb. 10 inspection, NYCHA workers responded that summer and renovated the kitchen and bathroom.

“When they did that, they disturbed the old paint that was sitting on the wall back from the 1950s,” De Norscia said during trial in Bison’s lawsuit. “The dust is full of contaminated lead paint . . . . It can now be inhaled and touched by the children who are crawling around.”

“They didn’t do the proper protocol” to keep the dust down, De Norscia said.

After her daughter, Y.M., registered a blood-lead level of 20 micrograms, city health inspectors found lead paint on two pipes. A November 2003 Health Department inspection noted, “There was lots of dust during renovations.”

NYCHA was ordered to clean up the unit a month later. At the time, Y.M. still registered a blood-lead level of 17 micrograms.

After the state’s top court rejected the authority’s argument that paint in the apartment did not cause Y.M.’s lead poisoning, NYCHA took the case to trial.

Three days into the trial last October, NYCHA offered to settle the case. In February, NYCHA agreed to pay Y.M.’s family $240,000.

On Wednesday NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said, “This 15-year-old case represents the mismanagement of prior administrations that we are striving to correct.”

Ultimately Y.M.’s blood-lead levels returned to normal and she was not placed in special education. Many children with high blood-lead wind up in special ed — including the daughter of tenant Tiesha Jones.

Jones would get a NYCHA letter each year saying there was no lead in her apartment, but after Dakota registered a blood-lead level of 45 micrograms in January 2010 at age 4, the city Health Department found lead paint everywhere.

She sued and her attorney, Thomas Giuffra, demanded that NYCHA turn over all the inspection reports about her apartment.

The reports from 2006 and 2008 — before Dakota’s frightening blood test — had no worker or tenant signatures but were deemed “completed.” There was no way to know if these inspections ever took place.

Dakota ended up in special education and in January a Bronx jury awarded Jones $57 million. NYCHA is now in talks with Giuffra about a settlement.