Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 12, 1991 TAG: 9103120198
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CELIA W. DUGGER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
"My baby's dead. My baby's dead," the voice cried out.
Beltram said she rushed upstairs and found the distraught mother in the hallway.
Inside the apartment, the woman's 7-month-old baby, Daniel, was dead of starvation.
Friday, the baby's mother, Jane Scott, 28, and father, Jose Valdez, 26, were arrested and charged with manslaughter and abandonment.
Scott told the police that she returned to her apartment, at 1106 Morris Ave., in the Melrose section, on Thursday morning after a six-day crack binge and found Daniel, wearing only diapers, dead on the floor next to his crib.
In the sunny, freshly renovated apartment building, her neighbors, mostly mothers with young children, were trying to fathom how parents could leave a helpless baby alone without food or water for five days.
They were also asking whether the city's child-welfare workers should have done more to protect Daniel.
Scott has several other children in foster care, said Lt. Donald Stephenson of the 44th Precinct detective squad.
It was unclear Friday why child-welfare officials allowed Scott to keep the child after she had lost or surrendered custody of the others.
Earl Weber, a spokesman for the city's Human Resources Administration, which handles child-welfare cases, said the agency could not comment on the baby's death because of confidentiality laws.
Next door to Scott's apartment, a neighbor said an agency caseworker visited her on Thursday evening to discuss the death.
Stephenson said he did not know if the agency had mishandled the case or if a caseworker had ever visited Daniel while he was alive.
"I don't know that they can be there 24 hours a day or that the measures they took were not appropriate," he said. "Certainly, we all look bad when some thing falls through the cracks."
That Scott and Valdez had troubled lives came as no surprise to the neighbors.
One neighbor, who shared a wall with Scott, said the couple's fighting was so loud once that it made the neighbor's little boy cry.
That night, about a month ago, the neighbor said, her frightened toddler came running to her. When she turned down the TV she heard the yelling.
"The whole wall shook," said the neighbor, who would speak only anonymously. "I heard her telling him, `Stop! Stop!' "
The neighbor said she had dialed 911. But when the police officer knocked on Scott's door, Scott said everything was fine and the officer went away, the neighbor recalled.
The neighbor then decided to mind her own business and never called the police again.
Several neighbors said Scott seemed to take good care of her son. When she took him out in his stroller, he was always warmly dressed and appeared healthy.
Wanda Hernandez, 22, who lives a floor above Scott, said she and Scott exchanged friendly smiles but never chatted because Hernandez speaks only Spanish.
The woman who lives next door to Scott said the baby's death came as a shock to her.
In the days after his mother had left him, the neighbor said, she never heard the baby's cries or whimpers through their common wall.
"If I had heard, I could have called the Fire Department," she said.
It was Beltram, who has a 13-month-old boy of her own, who discovered Scott, grief-stricken, outside her apartment at 8 a.m. on Thursday.
Scott, in a panic, told Beltram that she had left the apartment last Friday because her boyfriend was beating her and that she had left her baby with him.
"I told her to her face, `If he beat you up, what makes you think he wouldn't beat the baby up? You should have taken that child with you,' " Beltram said.
Neighbors said Scott moved to the apartment in November. They knew little else about her.
The police said the couple, who were arrested Friday about 1 a.m. and were being held pending arraignment, have used crack and have a drug problem.
Valdez told the police that he had left the baby alone the day after Scott left.
He said he had walked out the door and closed it behind him but did not lock it. "He had someplace to go," Lieutenant Stephenson said.
The city medical examiner has ruled that the baby died from starvation and dehydration.
"They were both remorseful at the death of the infant," Stephenson said. "No one intended for the infant to die. But both of them acted irresponsibly."
In the crack-plagued neighborhood where this broken family lived, women held their children especially close Friday.
Their apartments, with polished hardwood floors, big windows and clean white paint, are comfortable - a far cry from the shelters many of them came from. But crack vials still litter the apartment foyer.
Scott's next-door neighbor stayed indoors with her 18-month-old son. She was fiercely protective of the inquisitive, fearless toddler, and Daniel's death seemed to make her resolve stronger.
"I don't leave him with anybody," she said. "I don't let anybody watch him. I didn't bring him into this world to let nobody harm him."
by CNB