Nixzmary Brown: The Full Case File
Child Protection Files: Real Cases, Real System Failures by Jay Gill
Episode notes
Between October 2004 and December 2005, New York City's child welfare hotline received at least eight separate reports about one Brooklyn family. On January 11, 2006, seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown died weighing just 36 pounds, having been beaten, starved, and confined to a room in her family's apartment. This episode traces the full case file: the fourteen months of missed warning signs, the trial and conviction of her mother Nixzaliz Santiago and stepfather Cesar Rodriguez, the sweeping reforms that followed inside New York City's child protection agency, and the sobering five-years-later coda of Marchella Brett-Pierce, a second child who died on the same agency's watch. Along the way, the episode draws research comparisons to Baby P, Zymere Perkins, Adrian Jones, Star Hobson, and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, and closes with hard questions for anyone ...