ACS LEFT KID IN DANGER
Fatal abuse recalls ‘Nixzmary’ horror
Child-welfare workers previously documented repeated abuse of the 6-year-old Harlem boy who this week was found dead and covered in bruises — yet no move had made to get him out of the home, sources said Wednesday.
The Administration for Children’s Services found three confirmed cases of “maltreatment” — in February of this year and in June and August of 2015.
This past April, officials at little Zymere Perkins’ school alerted authorities that he had suspicious bruises and scratches on his legs, yet the ACS deemed there was no abuse in that case.
On Monday, Zymere’s battered body was discovered in his West 135th Street home. Sources believe the beating was punishment for his having relieved himself in an ice bucket.
Mom Geraldine Perkins, 26, and her boyfriend, Rysheim Smith, 42, were both charged Wednesday with misdemeanor child endangerment at Manhattan Criminal Court, where they were ordered held in lieu of bail.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said charges were expected to be upgraded pending a report form the medical examiner.
Mayor de Blasio on Wednesday called Zymere’s death “unacceptable,” and ordered a Department of Investigation probe into the city’s failures.
The mayor cited the infamous case of Nixzmary Brown, the 7-year-old girl beaten to death by her stepfather in 2006 in BedfordStuyvesant despite previous abuse allegations.
“It reminds me of Nixzmary Brown, and that’s what is troubling to me,” de Blasio said.
Major reforms were ordered in the wake of that murder, but the results have fallen far short of expectations.
In May, the DOI issued a blistering report that found that 16 percent of children whom the ACS determined had been abused or neglected had, within a year, been abused or neglected again.
Zymere’s mother has told police it was Smith who did the beating — and who then held the unresponsive child under running water in the shower before laying down the limp body and leaving the apartment, sources said.
The broomstick believed to be the murder weapon has been recovered from the building’s basement trash compactor, along with the boy’s feces-stained T-shirt.
Smith has told police he was not at home when the child was beaten, then asked for a lawyer and provided no additional statement, a source said.
Autopsy results shared with The Post show that the child had been beaten repeatedly over the course of months.
Several rib fractures were in different stages of healing, the source said, showing that the boy had suffered a sickening sequence of bone-breaking blows.
The youngster’s thymus — an organ vital to the immune system of children — had atrophied to the point of disappearing, the source said, a possible sign of significant, long-term stress.