Police Arrest Guardians of Child Found With Burns
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Police early yesterday morning arrested the guardians of a 2-year-old girl who was found with burns on her back, a leg, and an arm at a household in the Bronx, officials said.
The child’s mother and her boyfriend told police it was the result of a bathtub accident on February 5. Yolanda Rodriguez, 31, and Francis Viera, 45, were arrested on charges of endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison.
Officers from the Administration for Children’s Services went to the house in the Soundview section of the Bronx with police after a report was phoned in to the state’s child abuse hotline Tuesday night.
The girl, whose name wasn’t released, was brought to the hospital to be treated for burn wounds, though her condition was not considered serious. Her 3-year-old sibling was taken into ACS custody.
Ms. Rodriguez and Mr. Viera were expected to be arraigned last night.
ACS had no previous experience with the family, a spokeswoman, Tanya Valle-Batista, said.
One child welfare expert said the arrests yesterday were exactly what police and ACS workers should have done to prevent the January death of 7-year-old of the Nixzmary Brown case.
“All of this horror of her death would have been avoided if preventive services would have been in place,” the director of New School’s Center for City Affairs, Andrew White, said.
The protocol is called “Immediate Response Team” and is reserved for situations when there is severe neglect and physical or sexual abuse of children.
There has been a dramatic surge in the number of complaints made to the state’s child abuse hotline since the highly publicized Nixzmary Brown case.
From January 12 to January 29, there were 5,052 reports to the state central registry, Ms. Valle-Batista said. For the same period last year, there were 2,876 reports, she said.
The agency is hiring 525 new workers to deal with the increase in reports.
Mr. White said the ACS system is solid but its workers don’t always follow the agency’s procedures, as they did last night, when police and ACS officers swooped in immediately to investigate a tip.
