Last Friday afternoon, Izayah Hall was rushed to New York Hospital Queens, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
The medical examiner performing the autopsy found bruises on the sides of his throat with extensive hemorrhaging in the ocular muscles of his eyes. There was further hemorrhaging throughout his neck and multiple contusions along the back of his head.
Manual strangulation was the listed as the cause of death.
Izayah Hall was two-years-old.
Police say it was his mother who killed him.
According to the National Center for Child Death Review Policy and Practice , Izayah is one of more than 2,000 children in America who die of abuse and/or neglect each year. Experts say the actual number of these deaths is undoubtedly much higher with so many situations going unreported.
Statistics show that children under six account for 86% of all maltreatment deaths. Infants comprise 43% of these deaths.
In the majority of abuse cases it is the father or the mother’s boyfriend who is responsible for the death; mothers are the majority at fault in neglect fatalities.
Domestic violence, substance abuse and poverty are virtually trademark associations of fatal abuse.
National studies report fatal abuse events as not easily predictable. U.S. studies have found the majority of child victims and their perpetrators had no prior contact with Child Protective Services (CPS) at the time of the death.
But in defiance of each of those trends, statistics or whatever you choose to label them, Izayah Hall is still dead. And from an abuse event —not at the hands of his father or his mother’s boyfriend as statistics — but at the hands of his mother.
And, again unlike the majority, Izayah Hall was a victim whose mother had a storied past with child services.
In 2007 Afriyie Gaspard was arrested and charged with neglect when one of her children, not much older than Izayah at the time, was found wandering on Kissena Boulevard.
Her children were removed from her custody and remained that way until just a few months ago in March.
A little over four months after New York State deemed Gaspard worthy of getting her children back, she killed one she had while the others were not in her care.
It is tragic irony that took the life of Izayah Hall. A mother who falls outside the typical parameters of statistics. She was not labeled by the system as an abuser— she was a mere neglectful. One deemed fit to have custody of six children after she allowed one of them, barely old enough to walk, to leave their apartment and wander off into a busy intersection.
To those who know nothing of her, she is a 29-year-old mother of six who posted a stream of photos of her children on Facebook. She describes herself there as a stay at home mom; not working at the moment.
In reflecting on her days at Binghamton High School she writes she can only remember that she had to work very hard because she had to finish school on her own. “I mean,” she explains, “with no parents at all.”
She concludes her profile with the fact that she is not attending Queensborough Community College right now but states intentions of returning in the fall.
Pretty benign stuff right.
But to those of us who have before heard the name of Afriyie Gaspard, it resembles more of a malignancy.
Although the name didn’t ring a bell immediately, the circumstance of a toddler roaming around Flushing was all too vivid a recollection in The Forum newsroom when reading published reports about this incident. .
It was anger and outrage that marked the first remembrance of writing the story back in 2007. It was one of “How could it be that any mother would ever lose track of her child and risk their life like that? What could be the excuse? What they called it at the time was negligence.
And beyond remembering writing the story five years ago is the tragedy of having to write another with Afriyie Gaspard’s name in it again. But this time the question of the how could she, is not answered by neglect.
She is no longer a mother in the statistical neglect pool. She issued a warning signal in 2007—apparently everyone around her neglected to realize that her neglect had grown into full blown abuse. Just festering inside her.
Most reports over the last few day featuring her name include the word allegedly, but you wont see that word here.
Like his mother, Izayah Hall will not have the help of his parents to finish high school, but unlike his mother, it won’t be that his parents weren’t around.
No, he will miss high school because his mother saw to that when she choked him to death.
How could she?
