EMILY’S LAW
Nixzmary Brown abused to death by her stepdad while her mom looked on and did nothing
WE MUST PROTECT OUR CHILDREN
Barely two weeks after the tragic, January 11, 2006, death of seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown at the hands of her stepfather while her mother looked on and did nothing, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced “a series of new initiatives and investments to strengthen the City’s response to child abuse or neglect.” Almost immediately, he created a new public office, under his Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, called Family Services Coordinator, “to enhance inter-agency communication and coordination between agencies serving vulnerable children and families.”
Wasting no time, Bloomberg announced that “protocols that guide interactions between Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) staff and the Police Department, as well as those related to standards for reporting by the Department of Education of educational neglect, will be revised and reissued within 45 days.” It was not all talk. To ACS, an agency with an annual budget of $26 million U.S. dollars, he committed an additional $16 million “in investments in staff, supervisors, and training at ACS intended to decrease supervisory caseload levels, improve the quality of decision making, and strengthen safety procedures.”
Little Nixzmary was physically and emotionally tortured by her 27 year-old stepfather. Her battered body was discovered in her Brooklyn home which investigators called a “house of horrors.” It was reported that she “had been bound to a chair, tortured and starved for weeks before being killed by a savage blow to the head.” The story was unimaginable. After interviewing the parents, police sources said the emaciated seven-year-old who weighed only 36 pounds, less than what a four-year-old should weigh, was “trapped inside a makeshift, barren bedroom, and went to the bathroom in a cat’s litter box.”
Investigators found a small wooden and metal chair. It was reported that, “white twine-apparently used to bind the girl-dangled from the chair.” When medical technicians examined her tiny body, “they found fresh and old bruises, ligature marks around her ankles and wrists where she had been bound and a fresh wound to her head.” Her mother and stepfather were indicted for murder. Her grandmother was also indicted on charges of second-degree murder, child endangerment and assault. Her four siblings were taken into child protective custody. The first time her birth father saw her was in her coffin.
Elisa Izquierdo sexually abused and tortured to death by her own mother
New York’s Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) was created ten-years-and-two months before Nixzmary’s death, by another Mayor, Rudy Giuliani. A high-profile prosecutor by profession, known for his tough talk and wise-guy attitude, Giuliani acted swiftly, after the November 22, 1995, death of six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo who “was held prisoner, sexually abused, starved and beaten to death by her mother.” Elisa’s death prompted Giuliani to undertake a “total review and overhaul” of New York’s child welfare system. He did the unthinkable when he created the Administration of Children’s Services an independent agency to report directly to him. It was unprecedented but necessary.
He explained that Elisa’s death was a symbol of the failures of the New York City child welfare system. Three months later, February 12, 1996, Elisa’s Law was enacted and ACS went into full effect with a mission to enhance accountability and public understanding of child protective services. In February 2006, five weeks after Nixzmary’s death, the New York State senate approved a bill that calls for a mandatory life sentence without parole for parents, guardians, or persons in positions of trust who cause the death of a child (minor under 14) intentionally or through abuse or torture. It’s called Nixzmary’s Law.
Photo: Marlon King, 33, who raped and sodomized his 4 year step-daughter Amy Emily Anamanthodo to death. The sexual abuse began when she was 2 years-old
It’s time for Emily’s law. Amy Emily Anamanthodo’s may have been alive were it not for poor law enforcement investigative techniques, medical oversight, and judicial blunders that contributed to her death. Local authorities cannot hesitate. An integrated but independent, multi-disciplinary, child protection agency, in collaboration with personnel from law enforcement, the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Social Services and the Office of the Attorney General, professionally trained in best practice procedure, must be created. 
Amy Emily, finally, at peace
For instance, when last did Emily attend school? Excessive absences, educational neglect, are an indicator that there is trouble at home. Cigarette burns that prompted nurses to call and report physical abuse to the police should have also prompted them to undertake a sexual assault medical evaluation (rape evidence collection kits are now available in emergency rooms at all hospitals) which is now mandated common procedure for physically abused pre-pubertal children usually up to the age of 12. All the signs were there but it seems as though local social services practitioners just did not know how to decode them and then act.
Amy’s 19 year old mother, she had her first child at 13, that child died, had Emily at 15, Emily is now dead after being viciously tortured and sexually abused, and now says she is pregnant with her third while in state custody awaiting trial on several counts of child neglect (she should be tried alongside her commonlaw husband for murder)
The blueprint for an integrated human service project already exists. It is this basic. This new agency must have field offices in every district across Trinidad & Tobago. These new child protective workers must be academically qualified, master’s degree preferred, in social work, counseling or forensic psychology, required for employment at any similar agency in the U.S. or the U.K., and then further trained, according to agency protocol, in effective investigative techniques, risk assessment and intervention procedure. An independent foster care and preventive service system must also be created to support this new agency with clear and direct lines of communication, concerning child protection investigations, child safety issues and generally making homes safe for children.
It is also time to revamp the family court and introduce, as is now common practice in the U.S. and the U.K, on-going, continuing education and diversity awareness training in issues such as sexual abuse, domestic violence, disability rights, for judicial and law enforcement officials. The overlap between law enforcement and mental health makes it imperative. Attorneys must also be hired to work specifically for this new agency and to consult with child protective workers. Prevention programs, grass root campaigns for at-risk communities, seven-days-a-week-24-hours-a-day child abuse, neglect, and maltreatment hotlines must be also be implemented. Since 1974, the U.S. Child Abuse Prevention Act made it a crime to know and not report child abuse. After the fact media memorials, loud graveside wailing, and pretty clothes for a dead child do not negate the collective guilt that a society must share when children are the victims of those who are supposed to love, care and protect them. All who still have the privilege of living and breathing must take collective responsibility for Emily’s death.
Renee Cummings, MA, MS, MSED, CRC, is a journalist, therapist, rehabilitation and criminal justice specialist.