In Myls’ memory
The torture and murder of 4-year-old Myls Dobson are too horrendous to contemplate. Mayor de Blasio has rightly pledged to get to the bottom of how the city failed to protect him — charging Deputy Mayor Lilliam Barrios-Paoli and Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner Gladys Carrión with investigating what went wrong.
“We’re looking for anything that would tell us how we can do a better job of protecting kids,” the mayor said Friday.
The probe must be swift. It must be thorough. God willing, it will be the final in an exhausting cycle of child killings, investigations and reforms.
Myls was found dead Wednesday having been starved, burned with an oven grill, beaten with a belt buckle on his genitals, tied and gagged to a chair. He had been left by his father Okee Wade with girlfriend Kryzie King. According to cops, King admits to abusing Myls repeatedly eatedly — culminating in a fight that took his life.
Where was the boy’s mother? Ashlee Dobson was accused of abusing her son down South. She fled from South Carolina to New York, then, in 2011, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services stripped her of custody.
Unbelievably, ACS placed Myls permanently with his father — despite the fact that Wade had been arrested for rape and convicted of assault and attempted robbery.
Some cases make one yearn for the return of orphanages.
In June last year, Wade was busted again, this time on charges of stealing from bank accounts in Atlantic City. Last month, knowing that he was about to be arrested for skipping a court appearance, Wade left Myls with King, rather than with loving family members. Where was ACS in all of this? We must know. If convicted, convi King — a transgender performer, l living at the time in a $3,200-a-month apartment — will be most directly responsible for Myls’ death. No punishment would be too severe. Close second and third will be Myls’ miserably irresponsible parents.
Then, too, the sordid tragedy may als so prove to be a fresh indictment of the New York City agency charged with protecting the most vulnerable children amon among us.
Despite repeated warnings to city protectors, Adam Mann, 5, was killed by his parents in 1990 for eating a piece of cake. In 1995, Elisa Izquierdo, 6, was fatally burned and battered by her mother. In 2006, Nixzmary Brown, 7, was tortured and beaten to death by a stepfather.
Carrión and Barrios-Paoli must press ahead and determine whether ACS did right by Myls — or whether, and if so exactly how, it put the boy in death’s way.