A 4-Year-Old in Harlem Starved to Death at Home. How Were the Signs Missed?

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.

Mayor Eric Adams, asked at a news conference this week if the city had failed Jahmeik, responded that A.C.S. was in a constant double bind: accused by family advocates of being too intrusive and too quick to remove children from their homes on one hand, vilified for failing to safeguard children who end up fatally abused on the other.

Caseworkers, he said, were “a group of hard-working professionals that don’t want to disrupt families, but would like to go in and take necessary steps to protect children.”

A spokeswoman for A.C.S., Stephanie Gendell, declined to offer details on the case, citing state confidentiality laws designed in large part to protect siblings in fatal abuse cases. The agency is allowed to disclose information if doing so is not contrary to the children’s best interests.

She said the agency would conduct “an in-depth review” of the case to “identify opportunities to strengthen our policies, practices and services,” and that it would “transparently publish the results.”

Gladys Carrión, who served as the agency’s commissioner from 2014 to 2016, said that for the condition of Jahmeik and his siblings to have escaped the notice of neighbors, relatives, teachers or doctors, the family had to have been immensely isolated.

This seems to have been the case.

Mr. Modlin told a detective that the children rarely left the apartment and that they had seen a doctor only once since 2022, according to court papers. Ms. Ragsdale told a detective that she had not enrolled the children in school, as is mandatory for those 6 and older.

Ms. Carrión, who is now a senior adviser at Catalyze Justice, a nonprofit focused on juvenile justice, said that while A.C.S. is often blamed for the deaths of children who were known to caseworkers, holding the agency responsible “assumes that A.C.S. remains forever in the life of families.” She pointed to criticism that the agency’s investigations are themselves traumatic. “There’s such a push against how invasive A.C.S. is, and the direction is for less, and not more.”

Neighbors said in interviews that they never saw the children. Jahmeik’s death left them wondering in horror about the times they noticed Ms. Ragsdale returning from grocery shopping or showing kindness to other children on the block, even asking if they needed anything from the store.

“She was kind, very friendly,” said Erica Speed, 41, “offering to help all the kids around here.”

A spokeswoman for the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, which is representing Ms. Ragsdale in court, declined to comment on her case. A lawyer for New York County Defender Services, which represents Mr. Modlin, told a judge he suffered from “significant mental health problems” and had no criminal record. Both are being held at the jail on Rikers Island.

According to the family’s social service records, Ms. Ragsdale and Mr. Modlin were living in a shelter in Brooklyn in 2019 when a shelter supervisor reported that Ms. Ragsdale slapped Mr. Modlin in front of the children, who were upset but physically unharmed. The supervisor said that Mr. Modlin had also gotten “physical” with Ms. Ragsdale a week earlier. The children’s records at the time did not indicate that they were malnourished.

There were no arrests, but A.C.S. determined that Ms. Ragsdale had hit Mr. Modlin. Abusing a parent in the presence of their children is considered a form of child neglect and can lead to the abuser’s losing custody.

In Ms. Ragsdale’s case, a first offense, A.C.S. referred the family to preventive services — typically counseling and other instruction — which they received for a year.

During that time, A.C.S. received another report from the shelter, which said that Mr. Modlin had assaulted Ms. Ragsdale, who had bruises on her face and back. Ms. Ragsdale, the case notes said, would not speak in front of Mr. Modlin and locked herself in the bathroom any time their shelter room was being inspected.

On Jan. 31, 2020, the day Jahmeik was born — “healthy,” according to case notes — the agency received a report of inadequate guardianship and parental drug use. Ms. Ragsdale had tested positive for marijuana, but Jahmeik tested negative, and the case was closed as unfounded.

By 2022, the family had moved to the apartment in Harlem, on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard near 144th Street. A neighbor who lived on their floor, Pashnik Wade, 29, said she saw Ms. Ragsdale’s three older children around the time they moved in, playing and happy.

In July of that year, though, A.C.S. received a report from a neighbor that a terrible odor was coming from the apartment, that she believed the apartment was a health hazard and that the family would not let the building’s super in. She also said she heard Ms. Ragsdale say that Mr. Modlin had hit her.

The family did not let an A.C.S. caseworker in, either, according to A.C.S. records. Parents do not have to let caseworkers into their homes unless the agency has a court order or believes a child is at imminent risk of harm.

But Ms. Ragsdale brought the children to the front door, where the caseworker examined them, saw that they had eczema and instructed Ms. Ragsdale to take them to the emergency room, which she did. The discharge summary the hospital provided to A.C.S. did not note signs of malnutrition, according to the case notes.

The caseworker also noted that the apartment smelled. But by the time the family agreed to let the agency in weeks later, near the end of the 60-day investigation period, the apartment had been cleaned up.

Mr. McCall said Ms. Ragsdale told him she reached out to the Department of Education for special-education services for her oldest son, to no avail. The education department said it had no record of contact from Ms. Ragsdale.

He said one of Ms. Ragsdale’s sisters told him that she had withdrawn from them in recent years. The sister told him she had FaceTimed with the family a week before Jahmeik’s death, but she “only saw the kids from the chest up for 15 seconds or less” and “was not aware of what was happening in the home,” he said.

Mr. McCall said the city had let the family down. “How in the world do you have a child that’s 7 years old and never been in school, you never helped the children get enrolled in school?” Mr. McCall asked. “Something stinks, and has been stinking a long time.”

All the while, Ms. Ragsdale seemed to keep up cheerful appearances. Ms. Speed, one of her neighbors, said that if Ms. Ragsdale saw someone else’s child fall on the sidewalk, she would rush over and help. She would ask neighborhood children, “Are you all right, do you need anything?”

Ms. Wade, who lives right across from the family’s apartment on the sixth floor, said she often saw Ms. Ragsdale at the store buying a sandwich, chips and marijuana paraphernalia. She spotted Mr. Modlin less frequently. She would see him sitting in the stairwell outside his door, smoking.

Lately, she said, she often heard the couple fighting, sometimes about money. But, she added, “You never heard them yelling at kids.”

Four days before Jahmeik’s death, Ms. Wade crossed paths with Ms. Ragsdale in the building.

Ms. Wade had just enrolled her 4-year-old in the school across the street. She asked Ms. Ragsdale if she had done the same with her children.

“She said, ‘They’re staying with their grandmother right now,’” Ms. Wade said.

Then, as usual, Ms. Ragsdale made playful small talk with Ms. Wade’s son.

Ms. Wade’s voice rose in disbelief when she thought back to that encounter. “You know what you did to your 4-year-old, and you’re talking to my 4-year-old like it’s normal?”

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

Our Coverage of the Adams Administration

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• What Happens Next?: The indictment of Adams prompted calls for his resignation, but there is no legal requirement that he leave office. Gov. Kathy Hochul has the power to remove him.
• Federal Investigations Swirl: The case against the mayor is among several federal corruption investigations that have reached people in Adams’s orbit.
• Housing Proposal: Adams’s plan to ease the city’s housing shortage by making way for more than 100,000 new homes cleared the City Planning Commission, setting up a tougher fight between the administration and the City Council.
• Stop and Frisk: The N.Y.P.D.’s discipline for illegal street detentions is lax at every level — a failure that reaches all the way to the top of the force — according to a review ordered by a federal judge.