Jahmeik Modlin slowly starved to death in a squalid Harlem apartment — one of more than a half dozen neglected and abused kids who died under the lax supervision of the city’s Administration for Children’s Services in just the past year, a review by The Post has found.
The tragic 4-year-old’s parents allegedly kept his food locked in kitchen cabinets for up to two years, leaving Jahmeik so malnourished that he died weighing just 19 pounds — with his grieving family blaming ACS for abandoning the children in its care.
“ACS failed the kids,” Jahmeik’s aunt, Nyisha Ragsdale, told The Post. “They could have done something. They need to fix the system, their rules, their regulations — the whole thing.
“Why are these things happening? You don’t know what’s going on until something happens and that’s the sad part. It doesn’t have to come to this,” she said. “He was still a baby. He didn’t get a chance.”
The toddler is just one of the innocent victims of an agency stubbornly committed to a progressive ideology that considers removing children from a troubled home — no matter how abusive — to be cruel and even racist, leaving too many children to fend for themselves, a review by The Post found.
“Caseworkers are taught at their academy to keep the nucleus of the family together,” one frustrated ACS worker said. “Inexperienced workers do not want to upset their supervisors so they recommend to keep the family together, asking for counseling.
“However, there have been numerous times when a caseworker wrote in the report that the child should be put with another family member or foster care and the supervisor and our manager overruled them and said the child should be kept with the family after counseling,” the staffer said.
Of more than 18,000 reports of neglect filed with the 7,000-employee agency last year, 44% ended with no services being provided — with at least seven children dying under ACS supervision since the start of last year and dozens of others suffering horrific abuse, data reviewed by The Post shows.
The agency also struggles to keep staffers on the payroll, with 30% of ACS workers with no more than a year on the job. Sources told The Post that the overtaxed caseworkers are even pressured to rubber stamp some of the Big Apple’s most heartbreaking child abuse cases to lighten the workload.
And yet, it is the last line of defense for battered children.
Jahmeik’s starvation death on Oct. 13 led to murder charges against his parents, Laron Modlin and Nytavia Ragsdale, who were the subject of no less than four ACS neglect reports since 2019 — yet were allowed to retain custody of the boy and his three siblings, records show.
The boy and his siblings were left to starve because food was either locked away or kept in a stocked refrigerator turned to the wall — making it too heavy for the malnourished youngsters to get inside.
“They blame everybody except themselves,” Nyisha Ragsdale said of the child services agency.
Because the agency’s records are largely sealed, it is unclear exactly how many children have died under ACS supervision since last year, but The Post is highlighting seven high-profile cases.
In the most recent ACS fail, 8-year-old Nazir Millien and his mother lay dead in their Bronx apartment for at least two weeks while his kid sister, Promise Cotton, 4, was left trapped next to their decomposing bodies, surviving only on whatever chocolate she could find.
In the days before Promise was finally rescued, NYPD cops and ACS caseworkers both knocked on the family’s door — but simply walked away, leaving the traumatized girl to fend for herself, sources said.
Her mother, 38-year-old Lisa Cotton, had a history of unhinged behavior and an open ACS case for alleged child neglect, but was somehow allowed to keep custody of Promise and Nazir.
“Whoever signed off and gave this child back to his mother should be arrested,” an ACS source told The Post. “One innocent child’s death is too many. When someone dies in police custody there are protests outside the precinct and an investigation by the attorney general.
“You never see a protest outside an ACS office,” the source said. “Nobody talks about this problem.”
Last year Sharlene Santiago and her 10-year-old disabled son, Brian, were found dead in their apartment at a public housing project in Marble Hill after neighbors reported a stench coming from the home.
Santiago, 39, was under investigation by ACS and had temporarily lost custody of the boy, only to have him returned to the home where he is believed to have starved to death next to his mom.
“They could have done more,” Santiago’s cousin, Jose Zayas, said of the agency. “Her son needed help. He needed special care, so she needed extra help, definitely a hand.
“If that happened to my cousin I’m sure something similar happens to others,” he added. “I think the system could be worked on. They are there to help but these things happen, so I don’t think they are doing a good job.”
In another tragic case, Jazeli Mirabal, an 11-month-old Bronx boy, drowned in the family’s bathtub on Aug. 14, with sources reporting that both of his parents had been under ACS scrutiny.
Ariel Gonzalez, a 4-month-old Bronx boy, died after being taken to the hospital with acute cocaine intoxication on Aug. 10, with the case ruled a homicide.
On July 16, De’Neil Timberlake, 5, overdosed on methadone in the Bronx while his father, Darrell Timberlake — who had a previous bust for acting in a manner injurious to a child — was under ACS investigation, police sources said.
“When ACS gets involved it complicates things,” De’Neil’s grandfather said last week. “Had they kept a closer eye on the father, maybe it would have worked out a little better. If you see a person or parent is not healthy for them, remove them.”
The boy’s death came less than a week after one-month-old Joseph Heben, Jr., died at his home on Staten Island from severe malnutrition, according to police.
Yet another fatal ACS fail made headlines last year, when Bronx mom Lynija Eason was charged in the May 2023 death of her 6-year-old daughter, Jalayah Eason Branch, whose torturous young life allegedly included being beaten while she hung by her wrists in a bedroom closet.
According to a report by NY1, ACS determined neglect and abuse claims months earlier were unfounded, and in the weeks before the tragedy made one virtual visit and failed home and school visits.
Mayor Eric Adams backed the agency, which provides services to about 30,000 children every year, following the grisly Bronx discovery in Lisa Cotton’s home — and has been lax to criticize ACS.
In recent years, the agency has altered how it responds to child welfare reports, in many cases offering services to troubled families instead of launching abuse or neglect investigations — an initiative called Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement and Support, or CARES.
However, because the agency routinely cites its mandate to keep its records from public scrutiny, it is unclear how effective the approach has been — other than by the all too often fatal results.
Last year, the City Council reported that more than half of the children removed from their homes due to abuse or neglect were sent back to their families within six months.
An ACS audit by city Comptroller Brad Lander last year also found a series of shortcomings by the child services agency — but the review focused on it’s handling of kids in foster care.
The audit did expose glaring shortcomings in foster kid cases, reporting that more than 3% of children in foster care in 2023 suffered “substantial neglect and/or abuse” after being placed in the homes.
More troubling, the audit found that 76% of the abuse suffered by foster children happened after they were visiting their biological families with ACS authorization.
The city comptroller’s office is tasked with auditing all Big Apple departments at least once every four years, while the state comptroller has no such mandate — despite occasionally including ACS operations in local government reviews.
The most recent audit of ACS came in 2018, and also focused on children in foster care.
“ACS is the biggest cause of child deaths in the city and the DOI should be investigating them,” one frustrated law enforcement source snapped.
In a statement to The Post, an agency spokesperson said the safety of children in its care is “our top priority,” and is working with the NYPD to investigate the Lisa Cotton case.
“New York City has taken many steps to prioritize the hiring of child protection specialists and, as a result, our average caseloads are less than eight [per staffer] — well below the national standard of twelve,” they said. “Our frontline child protective specialists undergo extensive training, including on-the-job training.”
However, under state Social Service Law ACS information about the families it deals with are confidential.
Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy
