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From Florida to New York, Horrors of Child Abuse Know No Bounds

May 9th, 2011   No Comments   Abuse

Marchella Pierce didn’t have a chance. Born prematurely with underdeveloped lungs, she spent much of her four years in hospitals, being raised amid the chaos of a combative family struggling with drugs, and the Brooklyn, New York, child died at a mere 18 pounds — half what she reasonably should have weighed. Like cases involving the Florida Department of Children and Families, Pierce should have been overseen by New York’s child welfare agency — and a private organization hired to ensure her well being. She wasn’t.

Most sadly, as child attorneys and advocates have witnessed with our own sad examples here in Florida, the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, prosecutors say, essentially ignored the family, the New York Times wrote.

“She died in September by the ugliest means,” the paper continued. “She withered in poverty in a home in Brooklyn where the authorities said she had been drugged and often bound to a toddler bed by her mother, having realized a bare thimble’s worth of living.

“An examination of Marchella’s bleak, fleeting life, drawn from interviews with relatives, neighbors and law enforcement authorities, as well as from legal documents, shows that almost nothing went right for her,” the paper continued. Read the entire story here.

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