A Young Father Was Investigated 4 Times. Then His Newborn Died.
Years of warnings that children were being abused may have gone unheeded until the death of Kaseem Watkins.
The young father was arrested after his 6-week-old son was found lifeless in his crib in the Bronx one morning last week. Investigators had found undated video on a baby monitor of him pressing down on a pillow over the tiny boy’s head and charged him with murder.
But it was not the first time the authorities had heard about the father, Teshawn Watkins.
Not only had the police arrested him twice on charges he had assaulted the baby’s mother, but the authorities investigated him four times over allegations of child abuse in the family, including once when another son had a broken leg, law enforcement officials told The New York Times.
Now, nearly a week after Mr. Watkins, 27, was charged in his son Kaseem’s death, questions have begun to arise over how so many warning signs went unheeded and whether the city could have done more to protect Mr. Watkins’s three sons.
The city’s Administration for Children’s Services, which handles child abuse allegations, and the New York Police Department, which investigated at least one suspected case of abuse in the family, have not explained how the agencies responded to a troubling sequence of violence. Now, city officials are trying to determine if the system broke down.
“We need to know how this happened, why this happened, how it was possible this happened,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday.
Prosecutors said one video from the baby monitor’s memory card showed Mr. Watkins holding the newborn by the head and spinning him in the air. A cellphone video recorded by Mr. Watkins showed him punching Kaseem’s mother in the face while she was pregnant, leaving her with a bloody nose.
“It’s clear based on the investigation that there’s a pattern of violence in this home,” Amir Fadl, the prosecutor handling his arraignment, said. The couple has two older sons, 3 and 4.
The baby’s mother, Celicia Reyes, found Kaseem unresponsive the morning of Jan. 29 in their Williamsbridge apartment. He was later pronounced dead at Montefiore Medical Center, according to the police. The city medical examiner determined he died from asphyxiation.
Mr. Watkins told the police he had put a pillow over his son’s face in attempt to stop his crying and went to sleep. His lawyer, Cesar Gonzalez, said his client was “remorseful.”
But the police came to believe the act was intentional after discovering video on the baby monitor that showed Mr. Watkins apparently trying to smother the boy, prosecutors said at court hearings. The video was undated, but prosecutors said it was consistent with Mr. Watkins’s past behavior.
Details that have emerged in court hearings and interviews with people familiar with the case showed that the path that led to Kaseem’s death may have been years in the making.
Signs that the children were being abused arose as early as December 2016, when Ms. Reyes’s mother became concerned about bruises on another of the boys, who was then a newborn, said three law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation.
Doctors at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center determined the infant had a fractured leg that was already healing and a suspicious pattern of bruises. Ms. Reyes said she believed the baby’s brother, who was a year old, may have bitten him, but doctors did not think the marks could have been caused by a child’s bite, the officials said.
The Administration for Children’s Services placed the boys in foster care while the police investigated if they were abused, the officials said. The children were returned to their parents in 2017 after the police determined that no crime had occurred, officials said.
The law enforcement officials interviewed for this article said the determination was troubling, given that Ms. Reyes’s explanation was inconsistent with doctors’ findings, and because the detective did not interview the children’s parents. Ms. Reyes had declined to answer questions without a lawyer, and at the time Mr. Watkins had been ordered to stay away from her and their children after an arrest on domestic violence charges.
The abuse investigation occurred while the city’s child-welfare agency was under immense scrutiny following the deaths of Zymere Perkins, 6, and Jaden Jordan, 3, whose families both had repeated contact with the agency. The state ordered the city to install an independent monitor over the agency as the number of reports of children being abused or neglected in the city rose to nearly 69,000 in 2017 from about 65,000 in 2016.
The monitor found that the child-welfare agency had not been performing thorough investigations in all cases, including in some where there were “critical safety issues” that put children at risk.
At the same time, the then-commander of the Police Department’s Special Victims Division, which investigates sex crimes and child abuse, was warning higher-ups that the unit was dangerously understaffed, according to a 2018 city audit. The commander, Deputy Chief Michael Osgood, had written that the department could not be “the cause of a future Zymere Perkins.”
After Zymere’s death in September 2016, child-welfare teams increasingly flagged incoming reports of child abuse as serious cases, triggering a surge in police investigations. Investigators in the Bronx handled 416 new cases between Sept. 26, 2016, and Dec. 21, 2016, a 41 percent increase from the same period in 2015, according to a law enforcement official.
By the time Ms. Reyes’s mother called 911 on Dec. 28, the police were already swamped.
A spokeswoman for the Police Department did not answer questions about the department’s handling of the 2016 abuse investigation. At his news conference on Tuesday, the mayor said confidentiality rules prevented him from talking about the case more openly.
The Administration for Children’s Services said it had implemented nearly all of the monitor’s recommendations, including increased collaboration with the Police Department. Chanel Caraway, a spokeswoman, however, declined to comment on the Kaseem’s case beyond saying the agency was investigating with the Police Department.
“Our top priority is protecting the safety and well-being of all children in New York City,” Ms. Caraway said.
The authorities investigated three additional allegations of child abuse involving Mr. Watkins, the law enforcement officials said. But further details, including which agencies were involved and the timing of the allegations, were not available.
Abe George, a former prosecutor and a lawyer who has represented the families of several children who died from abuse, said one question was whether the child-welfare agency had been closely monitoring the family after four abuse allegations.
“If they didn’t do that, the intense monitoring, then I think there’s definitely some negligence on the part of A.C.S.,” said Mr. George, who added it was too early to tell if the city had faltered in the case.
Mr. Watkins also had a history of violence against Ms. Reyes, according to the police and court records.
He had been arrested in February 2016 after he lifted Ms. Reyes off the ground by her neck, law enforcement officers said. He pleaded guilty to harassment and was given a conditional discharge, according to court records.
In another incident, Ms. Reyes, a home attendant, told the police last May that she was headed to work when Mr. Watkins approached her at a Bronx train station, two law enforcement officials said. When she refused to speak to him, he took her cellphone and pushed her. He was arrested in June, but prosecutors dropped the case when Ms. Reyes decided not to testify, officials said.
In February 2019, he was arrested on charges that he had threatened an upstairs neighbor with a kitchen knife, the police said. A judge agreed early this year to dismiss the case if he stayed out of trouble for six months, according to court records.
Three weeks later, Mr. Watkins was back in court, accused of killing his own child. He is being held without bail on Rikers Island.
At a recent hearing, a handful of Mr. Watkins’s relatives sat in the courtroom watching the proceeding. They declined to be interviewed. Reached by phone, Ms. Reyes and Felicia Watson, Kaseem’s aunt, also declined to comment.
At the Holland Avenue apartment building where the family lived, a stuffed Mickey Mouse and six candles formed a memorial next to the entrance steps.
Neighbors said they had seen the police come and go from the apartment several times since the family moved in about two years ago, but they believed the parents had been fighting — not harming their children.
“They always looked clean, happy, well-fed,” Keisha Cartel, a downstairs neighbor, said. “I never suspected anything.”
Nikita Stewart contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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