In a statement to detectives, read in court, Barksdale admits disciplining the child after he allegedly talked back to her. She said he suffered his injuries after a series of suspicious falls.
"He fell into the bathtub," she told detectives. "I tried to pick him up, but he fell down. I tried to pick him up again, but he fell down again."
"I took him out by the armpits," she continued. "But he fell on the floor...Then I put him on the toilet, but he fell again, banged his head on the sink then hit his head on the floor."
She finally succeeded, she said, in getting him to a couch, where she left him unattended for nearly two days.
"I thought he was sleeping and I didn't want to wake him up," she told police.
It was not until Saturday at about 5:30 p.m. that she called 911, after he "felt cold and was not breathing."
Kevion's mother, Melba Proctor, is presently serving a short prison sentence for assaulting the child's father. According to relatives, she trusted both of her children, Kevion and 18 month-old Nyemiah, to Barksdale's mother, her grandmother, Shirley.
For some reason, over the past few weeks, Shirley Barksdale gave the children to Angela Barksdale to be cared for.
A spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services told Eyewitness News that they had absolutely no involvement in placing Kevion Shand with Angela Barksdale.
Sheila Stainback, press secretary for ACS, said that caseworkers have no file on Kevion or Nyemiah and and were never asked to place them in foster care.
ACS would only be involved if a person called the child abuse hotline to indicate that a child is in a situation that is not safe, and only then would ACS investigate.
ACS must be notified in some way, and the agency was apparently not notified in this case.
Proctor, upon leaving to serve her prison sentence, left the children in the care of her grandmother. This is her right, Stainback said, and requires no official approval or notification to ACS. This is a parent's right in New York City and in throughout country, she added.
It would have been different had the boy's mother placed her children voluntarily in ACS foster care. But that did not happen.
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WEB PRODUCED BY: Bill King
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