Jahmeik Modlin was found emaciated in a Harlem apartment stocked with food. His family’s child-welfare case had been closed two years before
The call came in to 911. The ambulance pulled up to the Harlem apartment building, and a 4-year-old boy’s skeletal frame was loaded into the back.
The mother told the police she did not know how her son came to be in a condition later described by authorities like this: Weight, 19 pounds — about normal for a 1-year-old. Hair growing on his face, a sign of long-term malnutrition. Thinning hair on his head, matted with feces.
By the next morning, Oct. 14, the boy, Jahmeik Modlin, was dead. His three older siblings, ages 5, 6 and 7, also severely malnourished, were hospitalized.
Since then, there has been a steady drumbeat of horrific details from the police and prosecutors about what went on in the family’s filthy sixth-floor apartment.
A stocked refrigerator turned to the wall to keep the children out. Childproof locks on the cupboards where food was kept. A statement from Jahmeik’s mother, Nytavia Ragsdale, 26, that for weeks he had been vomiting and then eating his vomit. A statement from his father, Laron Modlin, 25, that he did not notice his son wasting away because he was busy playing video games or on his phone.
The family had been on the radar of the city’s child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, on and off since 2019, before Jahmeik was born. But A.C.S. closed its last case with the family in 2022 after determining that the children were not being mistreated, according to a person who saw their social service records.
Jahmeik’s parents have been charged with second-degree manslaughter and face up to 15 years in prison.
But a mystery remains: How was this allowed to happen? What chances to stop it might the city have missed?
Abuse deaths of children remain rare in New York City. From 2013 to 2022 — the last year for which A.C.S. has statistics — the number of homicides of children in families known to the agency averaged nine per year.
But every few years there is a death in circumstances so abominable that it triggers a wave of policy changes at A.C.S. The names are seared in the city’s collective consciousness: Lisa Steinberg, Elisa Izquierdo, Nixzmary Brown, Zymere Perkins.
What investigators uncover in the weeks and months to come could determine whether Jahmeik Modlin’s name is added to that grim list.
The Rev. Kevin McCall, a civil rights advocate who is representing Jahmeik’s family, said Ms. Ragsdale told him that she had begged the agency for assistance in 2022. She said she told a caseworker that she was a domestic violence victim and asked for help getting Mr. Modlin off the lease. None was delivered, Mr. McCall said.
