Again, Too Little, Too Late And So Sorry
Lest we forget. Ten Novembers ago, Lisa Steinberg entered our collective consciences in this city and beyond.
In the Greenwich Village apartment of her adoptive parents, Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum, she lost her life. A bruised and battered Nussbaum, a former editor at Random House, had hovered by helplessly as Steinberg, a lawyer, beat the 6-year-old child into a coma. We shuddered, we raged. Lisa died three days later.
We asked: How could this situation exist? Didn’t someone know what regularly went on in that household? Why didn’t anyone do anything? Some people tried to intervene, but unsuccessfully and not very persistently.
“We’ve all wondered: What more could we have done?” a neighbor told reporters.
As a city, we vowed to take domestic violence more seriously and to redouble efforts to protect children from abusive caregivers. We swamped the child abuse hot line, forcing the state to hire additional operators and leading the social services commissioner to plead with people to refrain from calling except in emergencies.
Some 300 of us, mostly strangers, turned out for Lisa’s funeral bearing roses and other tokens. There, a rabbi who officiated said: “We want to believe this death is an isolated case, a freak of nature, and yet we know it is not.” A priest who also officiated prayed that Lisa’s death “makes us more sensitive to evil not only around us, but within us.” We vowed never to forget Lisa. And we have not, because every year, several times a year, we learn of another child whose life has been marked by beatings, torture, mutilation, deprivation and, inevitably, death.
In December 1988, it was Jessica Cortez, age 5, who’d been beaten and sexually assaulted by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Two Novembers ago, it was a 6-year-old girl, Elisa Izquierdo, who’d been beaten and sexually assaulted by a crazed mother who thought the child was possessed by Satan.
And so, we remembered Lisa and Elisa. By then, our rage forced the city to overhaul the child welfare system, giving it a new name, the Administration for Children’s Services, and a new commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta. Yet the same combination of bureaucratic bungling and see-no-evil, hear-no-evil relatives and neighbors has continued to claim lives:
Kevin Mikell, 2, was beaten to death after having been tortured by his depraved father, whose notion of potty training was to batter the boy and burn him with cigarettes while forcing him to sit on a toilet seat for 12 hours.
Rayvon Evans, 22 months, died after his mother scalded him in a tub of water. Two months later, his remains were tossed out a window like so much garbage.
Nadine Lockwood, 4, was deliberately starved to death by her mother, Carla. When she died, the child weighed only 15 pounds.
Now, another November. Another occasion to remember Lisa - as well as Jessica, Elisa, Rayvon, Kevin and Nadine - after another horrific death. Sabrina Green, 9, was beaten and tortured so much that she developed gangrene and lost a thumb.
Another funeral, this one Friday. More tears and teddy bears from strangers. More evidence of bungling bureaucrats and do-nothing relatives and neighbors. More eulogies, including one offered by 10-year-old Eric Jones: “This has been going on for so long now, and they keep saying they are going to do something about it.”
Scoppetta and Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew attended the funeral and heard Eric’s condemnation of their system. They’re now trying to figure out how Sabrina “fell through the cracks.” As they’re looking, I’d remind them of a quote Scoppetta used with favor in a report he issued last December, “Protecting the Children of New York.”
“Children don’t fall through cracks; they fall through fingers.”
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