A former ACS worker charged in the horrific starvation death of a 4-year-old Brooklyn girl is a victim to be pitied, too, his lawyer claimed yesterday.
Damon Adams — hit with the first such prosecution of a child-protective worker in city history — is facing “unjustifiable persecution,” his lawyer, Anthony Grandenette, said in court.
Adams has been charged with criminally negligent homicide along with an Administration for Children’s Services colleague in the death of Marchella Pierce.
The little girl was allegedly starved, force-fed cold-medication pills, bound and beaten to death by her mother, Carlotta Brett-Pierce, in the family’s Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment last year.
Adams, 36, is accused of failing to make all of the mandated biweekly visits to the home before the little girl’s death Sept. 2 — and then doctoring his reports afterward to make it appear as if he had.
The other charged former ACS worker, Chereece Bell, 34, allegedly failed to monitor Adams’ work.
Grandenette told the judge that he plans to try to have the charge against Adams completely dismissed because it requires proof that Adams failed to perceive a “substantial and unjustifiable risk” that Brett-Pierce might kill her child.
Given that ACS’s investigation into the mom was based only on the fact that she had tested positive for marijuana when she gave birth to another child, Adams wouldn’t have had reason to suspect such “risk,” the lawyer said.
“A prosecution based upon such a proposition is preposterous,” Grandenette said. “It’s quite a leap to go from an allegation of possible malfeasance to a criminal prosecution.”
Brett-Pierce has been charged with the murder of her daughter. Her mother, Loretta Brett, who slept in the same room where the emaciated Marchella — who weighed just 18 pounds — was allegedly bound to the bars of her crib, was charged with manslaughter.
When the ACS workers were charged last month, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes said, “Baby Marchella might be alive today had these ACS workers attended to her case with the basic levels of care it deserved, or had her grandmother stepped in and put a stop to the shocking abuse she is charged with facilitating.”
Grandenette yesterday noted that Hynes was convening a grand jury to investigate “systemic failures” at ACS in the wake of the girl’s death. He told Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Patricia DiMango that he should be allowed to see the minutes from that secret proceeding because the information could clear his client.
DiMango told him to put the request in writing and that she would consider it.
Adams is scheduled back in court May 11.
