NEW YORK CITY ACS DEFENSE LAWYER

  Doctors never examined 4-year-old Jayce Eubanks’s cuts and bruises. Child welfare workers did not alert the police to 7-year-old Julissia Batties’s black eye. Investigators closed Aisyn Emerson-Gonzalez’s case despite his swollen eye and a lump on his head. All three children were beaten to death at home in the closing weeks of this summer, Their deaths were among a string of fatalities involving children who were the subject of warnings to child welfare authorities or the police in New York City. While the number of homicides of children in the city this year is close to that of recent years, the series of killings has exposed the holes in a multiagency safety net, from social workers to detectives, where a wrong decision could mean the death of a child. In recent weeks, city officials have examined how investigators skipped steps, were slow to follow up or might have closed an abuse case too soon. Several children died even after their cases had been escalated to the city’s “In...