Horrified neighbors were shocked to learn about the deaths of a sickly boy and his mother whose bodies were found inside their Bronx apartment this week – and demanded that the city Administration for Children’s Services “do a better job” protecting vulnerable kids.
The bodies of Brian Santiago, 10, and his mother Charlene Santiago seemingly went unnoticed until late Wednesday, when neighbors reported a foul odor in their unit at the Marble Hill NYCHA complex.
The 39-year-old mother was investigated by the ACS and even had her son temporarily removed from her care at some point before she died, leaving her special-needs boy, who used a feeding tube, to likely starve to death, sources said.
“ACS has to do a better job. Kids are dying,” said neighbor Maritza Ortiz, 56, who also has a daughter with special needs and is familiar with the complex care a feeding tube requires.
“Why give the child back if the parents are not going to change?” Ortiz wondered Friday. “The kids can’t speak for themselves. ACS is their voice.”
Ortiz recalled meeting Santiago when the mom moved in about five or six years ago. Brian, she remembered, looked young for his age and was “very, very skinny.”
Santiago would not open the door when nurses came to see them, the neighbor added.
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“I’m shocked, oh my God. Nobody to feed him. She had to die first… I know he was suffering,” Ortiz lamented.
Santiago did not work, but got a disability check for her son, according to Ortiz.
“It was always her and the little kid, always, all the time, never saw her with anybody,” she told The Post.
“She’d take the kid from the house to the bus stop to get the school bus and pick him up in the afternoon, even in the winter.”
Brian was tiny but always had clean clothes and socks – while his petite mother wore the same “dirty” pants and shirt, and even sandals in the winter, Ortiz added.
Santiago also had a pet pitbull, which people in the surrounding units heard “barking day and night,” Ortiz said.
Sources said the tragic Santiago had mental health problems. The Medical Examiner’s Office is conducting a toxicology test to confirm her cause of death.
Other Marble Hill residents, even the mom and son’s next door neighbor, said they either never saw Santiago or spotted her sparingly.
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Gwendolyn Paige, 68, a longtime Marble Hill resident and board member, said that she learned about Brian for the first time when she heard about her neighbors’ deaths on the news.
“Nobody seen that lady with a child coming out of this building. Nothing,” she said.
Another neighbor, Altagracia Rodriguez, 85, remembered Santiago coming to her apartment twice, once to ask for coffee and sugar and the other to ask about some pictures on the neighbor’s wall.
A man once knocked on the door and asked Rodriguez if she noticed a lot of people going into Santiago’s apartment, she added.
“I feel bad… the baby is innocent,” Rodriguez said of the mother and son’s deaths.
Two children who live in the building added that they saw a little boy in a wheelchair being pushed around the park a few days ago, but added that they did not really see him much.
When the police finally entered the Santiagos’ apartment on Wednesday night, it was covered in feces, Ortiz claimed.
Ortiz, who has lived at the public housing complex for 21 years, held her head in her hands and fought back tears as she explained that she noticed something “smelling like a body” as early as last week.
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“I had to close my windows in the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom. There were a lot of flies coming inside my bedroom. They were big flies. I sprayed and I kept the windows closed,” the neighbor said.
Ortiz was heartbroken to learn that another Bronx child, 11-month-old Jazeli Mirabel, was found drowned on Wednesday. Both of Mirabel’s parents had also been investigated by the ACS.
“I don’t know what’s happening. I’m in pain. I feel for those kids. This is too much for the kids,” she said.
Neighbors said the baby was “purple” and lying on the floor just inside the front door of her family’s apartment when her mother ran over looking for help
“I heard screaming. I was the first one out. She was knocking on the door,” one recalled. “She was calling for help. She was saying, ‘Help, my baby is dying.’”
Another neighbor on the same floor of the apartment said little Jazeli lived with her mother and two older sisters, but that her dad did not reside there and was not home when she died. The child’s mom had a volatile relationship with her boyfriend, who stopped visiting after one of their frequent fights got physical between them last year, neighbors added.
Police on Friday executed a search warrant at the apartment, where they were still collecting evidence.
One of the neighbors said that social services could have prevented the baby’s death.
“The whole situation could’ve been prevented. Social services should have taken the kids away because the neighbors made complaints to ACS because of the fights [between the mom and dad],” said the woman.
“If they’d taken the kids away from her earlier, she probably wouldn’t have died.”
— Additional reporting by Larry Celona
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