By Yolanne Almanzar
A 27-year old woman sitting in a cell at Rikers Island has only one wish, says her lawyer.
Teresa Foster wants to attend her 2-year-old son’s funeral, but faces possible murder charges for his brutal death.
Last week, Aiyden Davis was found unconscious after police rushed to Foster’s apartment at 41 Kingston Ave. in response to a 911 call of assault. He was pronounced dead at Interfaith Medical Center. Foster, was at her job as a security guard at the time, but left her son with her boyfriend, Reginald Williams, 31. It was his first time baby-sitting the boy alone.
Foster was charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. Williams was charged with second-degree murder.
A spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office said the cause of death was “blunt impact injuries of the head, torso and extremities with liver laceration and internal bleeding.”
According to news reports, Williams began beating Aidyen with his hands, elbows and knees, then slammed him to the floor when the boy refused to recite his ABCs. According to the criminal complaint, Foster admitted to investigators to beating Aiyden with a belt between Sept. 1 and Sept. 12 and that it caused a welt. An official in the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office found bruises on the boy’s body during the autopsy consistent with injuries caused by a belt.
Laura Postiglione, a spokeswoman at the Administration for Children’s Services, wrote in an e-mail the agency was investigating the death, but said she could not comment further on the case.
In recent weeks, the ACS has come under intense public outrage after admitting serious lapses in the case of 4-year-old Marchella Pierce. The girl was found bruised and weighing less than 20 pounds in her mother’s apartment on Sept. 2.
Stephanie Gendell, Associate Executive Director for Policy and Public Affairs at the Citizens’ Committee for Children, said the Davis case is different because it appears ACS had no knowledge of abuse happening.
“There were neighbors and families who seemed to know this child was not being taken care of and no one made a report,” she said. “What needed to be done for this family was someone to have alerted the system.”
Richard H. Calica, Executive Director at the Juvenile Protective Agency in Chicago and a leading authority on child welfare, said agencies like ACS have standards to identify situations where children would be at high risk for harm. He said even with these protocols in place, violent human behavior is unpredictable and about 40 percent of parents never harm their children even after they are identified as a risk.
“Just because you hit your kid with a belt today doesn’t mean you’ll break your kid’s arm tomorrow,” he said.
Calica said the most difficult decision for outsiders in such cases when an agency is not protecting a child is when to become involved.
“At what level of evidence does society need in order to be able to have the right to be nosing around in family affairs?” he said.
Foster, who is being held on $150,000 bail, pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn Criminal Court. According to news reports, Judge Loren Baily-Schiffman said she could not consider the charges against Foster as “typical assault.”
“The allegations are this child was beaten over a period of time, not just on one day,” she said. “I can’t treat this as if it were a misdemeanor now. It’s way too serious.”
The grand jury was scheduled to resume its hearing Friday.
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