For all of his nine years, Frashawn Jones lived in a reclusive world with 49 other severely handicapped and retarded children at the Terence Cardinal Cooke Center, an East Harlem specialty hospital where residents are subject to head counts every 15 minutes.

In the 50-year history of the hospital’s developmental disabilities unit, none of the children, most of whom are wheelchair-bound, had ever gone missing after a head count. Not until yesterday morning.

After a two-hour internal search of the facility, Frashawn, a developmentally disabled child who was not wheelchair-bound, was found unconscious and wedged toward the bottom end of a laundry chute, police said. He was later taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

As of yesterday evening, no criminal wrongdoing was suspected in the boy’s death, police officials said, although they noted their investigation was continuing. At the hospital, where internal meetings took place throughout the day in attempts to figure out how Frashawn could have left his bed and entered the laundry chute, the reaction of staff ranged from confusion to shock.

According to the hospital’s spokesman, Joseph Brown, the child was present at his 6:15 a.m. headcount. By 6:30 he was missing.

The most puzzling element in the death, Mr. Brown said, was how Frashawn could have gained access to the chute, which is located in a closet on the wing. In order for Frashawn to get into the laundry chute he would have had to maneuver behind two separate doors, both of which were typically locked with keys.

When hospital administrators found Frashawn two hours later, they attempted to administer mouth-to-mouth CPR treatment. They then called 911.

The child was dead when paramedics arrived, police said. An autopsy will be conducted by the medical examiner’s office today to determine the cause of death. Family members could not be reached last night. “The family is angry. So is the staff,” Mr. Brown said.

A spokeswoman for the Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, the state agency that provides funds for the hospital, said the last time officials conducted an inspection of the facility was in August 2004. While relatively common violations “like chipped paint here and there” were found, nothing that constituted violations of a “serious or egregious” nature was discovered, the spokeswoman, Deborah Sturm-Rausch, said. The results of previous inspections conducted at the hospital were not available yesterday, she said.