Prison was only the last stop on Carla Lockwood's miserable family journey, one that over the years brought the troubled mother and her children into contact with far more institutions than just the city's child welfare agency.
Before her 4-year-old daughter, Nadine, was found dead last week, there were public schools, hospitals, the housing authority, welfare benefits offices and a private social service agency.The Lockwoods had faced homelessness and sought emergency shelter, along the way becoming clients of one of the city's highly regarded private social-service agencies; the family had been aided by a housing subsidy from the city, only to be cut off eventually from welfare benefits and food stamps by the city's Human Resources Administration; three of the eight children had not gone to the local public school for a year or more; three had been born addicted to drugs at one of the city's prominent hospitals, one with an extensive program for dealing with just such dangerous family predicaments.
In the end, the mix of bad fortune and good intentions, blessings, mistakes and a mother's apparent act of malice, did not prevent Nadine from dying. The city's medical examiner on Wednesday ruled that the child had died of malnutrition and dehydration, reduced nearly to bones. At her death, a week from her fifth birthday, Nadine Lockwood weighed 151/2 pounds, less than the weight of an average 1-year-old.
"Our investigation," said Nicholas Scoppetta, commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services, "will focus on the performance of the child welfare agency, but it will also include all the agencies, schools, hospitals and neighborhood-based organizations that came into contact with this family. Of course, the child welfare agency should take the lead in integrating the efforts of others trying to assist troubled families. But the saying is that it takes a village to raise a child. Where was the village?"
The Lockwood family's first stop after leaving the Manhattan apartment of Ms. Lockwood's mother in 1991 was an apartment provided by the Children's Aid Society, a private nonprofit organization that then had Scoppetta as its president.
According to that agency's records, Nadine Lockwood was a month old when she arrived with four siblings and her mother at a renovated apartment on West 118th Street.
The family stayed for eight months at the apartment - offered day care, health-care services, job training and other resources. Staff members, according to agency reports, instantly identified Ms. Lockwood as an "overwhelmed parent."
An agency official said Ms. Lockwood often failed to get her children organized for school, and attendance was a recurring problem; that she repeatedly refused to participate in parenting classes and job-training seminars; that despite the offer of free medical care, it was difficult for the staff to have the children examined.
"Family situation has to be monitored closely," the records said.
Despite the fact that Ms. Lockwood had a three-year history with the city's child welfare agency - both Nadine and another girl, Natasha, had been born with drugs in their system, prompting investigations - that information was never shared with the Children's Aid Society. The Lockwoods had been sent to the agency as a "housing referral."
The Children's Aid Society, whatever its concerns about Ms. Lockwood's fitness as a parent, never saw physical evidence of neglect or abuse.