A Queens mother with a long history of child neglect was ordered held on $1 million bail Thursday — the first hint of justice for her son, 5-year-old Mikey Guzman, who died from a deadly overdose of his epilepsy medicine.
Phyllis Reinoso, 31, had been on the lam since cops tried to arrest her in December 2017, nearly a year after the boy’s horrific death.
Mikey’s final moments had been spent vomiting and convulsing in his Jamaica bed, with four times the correct dose of the phenolbarbitol in his blood, prosecutors say.
Reinoso was extradited from Alabama early Thursday, and charged with reckless manslaughter and assault for the horrific January 2017 homicide.
It had taken cops months of tracking her through at least five states as she jumped house to house of her family members and friends.
Investigators from the 103rd Precinct finally got the jump on her in the southern Alabama town of Atmore, where she was staying with relatives, a law enforcement source told The Post.
“We were always a day behind her,” one source said.
“We followed her to Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and California before they finally grabbed her in Alabama” on July 9.
Before that, it took investigators many months to establish how Mikey died — and who was responsible.
“This was a long-term medical and legal investigation,” Queens Assistant District Attorney Melissa Kelly said at Reinoso’s arraignment.
Before fleeing New York, Reinoso herself had admitted to detectives that she is the only one who administered Mikey’s twice-daily doses of two medications — phenobarbital and carbamazepine.
On the day before his death, some time after Reinoso left the boy in the care of his siblings, video surveillance shows the boy was unable to walk.
“You can see Michael turned sluggish and was being carried into the house,” Kelly said.
Reinoso herself admitted to detectives that she didn’t get home until early the next morning, Kelly said.
She described to detectives touching Mikey’s body as he lay lifeless in his bed on the afternoon of Jan. 22, 2017 — after a night of partying.
“He was cold. I saw vomit coming out of his nose and mouth,” the prosecutor said she told cops. “I screamed, ‘Call 911.’”
Reinoso never learned her lesson from four months before Mikey’s death, when another medication error — this time giving him too little — resulted in him being hospitalized for eight days for uncontrolled seizures, prosecutors said.
In arguing for “reasonable” bail, Reinoso’s defense lawyer, Michael Schwed, insisted that there is no proof that the mom gave her son the fatal dose.
“It could have been accidental, it could have been on purpose,” he told the judge.
“But there is no proof she is the one that did it. They are just making her guilty because she is the mother.”
He also insisted that Reinoso hadn’t fled — she was merely visiting with family members, friends and a “life coach” in Virginia to deal with the trauma of her boy’s death, he said.
Reinoso is due back in court on Aug. 17.
Abuse was rife in the boy’s home, which he shared with his father, Michael Guzman, Sr., and five siblings.
In the decade before his death, child-welfare workers had visited 13 times amid allegations of abuse and neglect.
In eight cases the Administration for Children’s Services ruled the allegations credible — including for cuts and bruises on Mikey’s older sisters, and an allegation from 2011 that one of the older siblings had been sexually abused by a relative.
“Our top priority is protecting the safety and well-being of all children in New York City,” agency spokeswoman Marisa Kaufman said Thursday.
“When this fatality occurred in January 2017, ACS launched an investigation and immediately took action to secure the safety of the children in this home.”
The boy’s death followed closely on the heels of two other high-profile deaths of children who’d been monitored by ACS — those of 6-year-old Zymere Perkins and 3-year-old Jaden Jordan, and prompted a highly critical report by the City Department of Investigation.
