For years, the twin boys who lived in apartment No. 6 in the sandy-colored building in the Bronx played in the hallways and laughed out front, always under the watchful eye of their mother and grandmother.
Sometimes they struggled. Nonverbal and autistic, the brothers, 16, still wore diapers and occasionally had meltdowns. But their two caregivers always appeared patient and doting, bringing home pizzas or waiting for a tantrum to pass with kind words of encouragement.
So it was a shock when a neighbor, Christine Valentin, looked out her window in Mott Haven on March 19 to see one of the teenagers, Adonis Jarvis, rail-thin and strapped to a gurney as paramedics attended to him. He was a shadow of the boy who had been her daughter’s classmate at P.S. 811X, a Bronx public school for students with special needs.
That evening, even from a distance, she could see Adonis’s ribs.
Adonis died soon after at Lincoln Hospital. He weighed just 59 pounds, the New York City Medical Examiner said, his death the result of prolonged dehydration and starvation. On Thursday, his mother, Geneva Jarvis, 36, and maternal grandmother, Denise Jarvis, 62, were indicted in Bronx Criminal Court and charged with murder via depraved indifference, as well as manslaughter. They also face charges regarding the surviving boy.
“These two women failed in their duty and responsibility to care for these boys,” the Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark said in a statement after their indictment.
For the past year, the twins seemed to be missing from this corner of the South Bronx. They had been pulled from the public school they attended, according to Ms. Valentin. The grandmother would have the boys ready at 147th Street 20 minutes before the yellow school bus was scheduled to pick them up, Ms. Valentin said. The bus stopped coming by.
A spokeswoman for the New York City Public Schools declined to answer questions about their enrollment status, citing privacy laws.
The boys used to make noise, and had a history of seizures. “We used to hear them jumping and everything,” said Dennis Rivera, 70, the superintendent of their building, up until sometime last year. “But then all of that stopped.”
Last December, Veronica Rosales, 50, a longtime downstairs neighbor of the family, who had gotten accustomed to the patter of the boys’ feet and their late-night cries, noticed a stark silence. Yet she would still see their grandmother, and mother, a cashier at Target, bringing home pizza after work.
“I was asking them, ‘Where are the kids?’” Ms. Rosales recalled. “They said, ‘They were OK.’”
“We never saw the kids again,” Ms. Rosales said.
Lawyers for the women could not immediately be reached. On Thursday, a sour smell seeped behind the door of apartment No. 6, revealing rooms that buzzed with flies, the floor invisible under pizza boxes, dirty clothing and trash. A soiled mattress was visible. On March 19, paramedics who responded to a 911 call to the apartment, the district attorney said, discovered both boys covered with bed sores, feces and flies.
The two women are also charged with endangering the welfare of a person who could not take care of himself. Prosecutors say they neglected Adonis’s twin brother, who barely survived. He is still suffering consequences of the acute starvation, according to officials. On March 19, that boy weighed 60 pounds. Two years ago, at his last documented pediatrician’s visit, he weighed 20 pounds more.
Marisa Kaufman, a spokeswoman for the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, declined to comment on the specifics of the case. She added that the department was working with the police, who are investigating.
It appears that the two women may have struggled financially. Court records show an eviction proceeding this month for the elder Ms. Jarvis for not paying rent on the apartment.
On Valentine’s Day this year, a man banged on the door of the apartment complex, said Mr. Rivera, the superintendent. He held a bouquet of red roses and demanded to be let in to see the twins.
“He said, ‘That’s my kids, they are autistic,’” Mr. Rivera said. “‘I want to figure out what’s going on.’”
Geneva Jarvis confirmed the man was the father of the twins, Mr. Rivera said. But she told Mr. Rivera to never to to let him inside.
On Friday, Ms. Valentin recalled how she once gave the twins’ mother eight boxes of adult diapers she no longer needed for her own teenager with special needs. She thought she understood the challenges of the Jarvis household, she said.
“They depend on you for everything, for every meal, and every drink and every sip,” she said about raising a teenager with special needs. “How could you not?” She added: “I feel numb, because I still don’t comprehend how this can happen.”
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