Horrified neighbors were shocked to learn that a sickly boy and his mother had died this week. The bodies of the two boys were found in their Bronx apartment. They called on the city’s Department of Children and Youth Services to “better protect at-risk children.”
The bodies of 10-year-old Brian Santiago and his mother, Charlene Santiago, apparently went unnoticed until Wednesday evening, when neighbors reported a foul odor in their apartment in the Marble Hill NYCHA complex.
The 39-year-old mother was examined by the ACS and even had her son temporarily taken away from her shortly before her death. According to sources, her special needs boy, who was fed through a feeding tube, likely starved to death.
“ACS needs to do a better job. Children are dying,” said neighbor Maritza Ortiz, 56, who also has a daughter with special needs and is familiar with the complex care that a feeding tube requires.
“Why return the child if the parents don’t change?” Ortiz asked Friday. “The children can’t speak for themselves. ACS is their voice.”
Ortiz recalled meeting Santiago when his mother moved in about five or six years ago. Brian, she recalled, looked young for his age and was “very, very thin.”
Charlene did not open the door when nurses came to check on them, the neighbor added.
“I’m shocked, oh my God. No one to feed him. She had to die first… I know he suffered,” Ortiz lamented.
Santiago did not work, but according to Ortiz, she received a disability pension for her son.
“It was always her and the little kid, always, all the time, I never saw her with anyone,” she told The Post.
“She took the boy from the house to the bus stop so he could catch the school bus and picked him up in the afternoon, even in the winter.”
Although Brian was tiny, he always wore clean clothes and socks – while his petite mother wore the same “dirty” pants and shirts and even sandals in the winter, Ortiz added.
Santiago also had a pet pit bull that people in surrounding housing units heard “barking day and night,” Ortiz said.
According to sources, the tragic Santiago had psychological problems. The medical examiner is currently conducting a toxicology test to confirm the cause of death.
Other Marble Hill residents, even the mother and son’s neighbor, said they either never saw Santiago or only saw him occasionally.
Gwendolyn Paige, 68, a longtime Marble Hill resident and board member, said she first learned about Brian when she heard about her neighbors’ deaths on the news.
“Nobody saw the woman with the child coming out of this building. Nothing,” she said
Another neighbor, Altagracia Rodriguez, recalled Santiago coming to her apartment twice.
“The first time she asked me for coffee and sugar. I gave her the coffee in a plastic cup and the sugar in a plastic bag. She said thank you,” Rodriguez, 85, said of the meeting.
The second time, Santiago Rodriguez asked for some pictures on her wall, but left without asking for anything and “never came back.”
She added that one time a man knocked on the door and asked Rodriguez if she noticed a lot of people entering Santiago’s apartment.
“I feel bad… the baby is innocent,” Rodriguez said of the deaths of mother and son.
Two children who live in the building added that they saw a young boy being pushed around the park in a wheelchair a few days ago, but they didn’t see him very often.
When police finally entered the Santiagos’ apartment on Wednesday evening, it was covered in feces, Ortiz claimed.
Ortiz, who has lived in the public housing complex for 21 years, held her head in her hands and fought back tears as she explained that last week she had noticed something “that smelled like a corpse.”
“I had to close the windows in the kitchen, living room and bedroom. A lot of flies came into my bedroom. They were big flies. I sprayed and kept the windows closed,” said the neighbor.
Ortiz was deeply saddened to learn that another Bronx child, 11-month-old Jazeli Mirabel, was found drowned on Wednesday. Mirabel’s parents were also investigated by the ACS.
“I don’t know what’s going on. I’m in pain. I feel for the children. This is too much for the children,” she said.
— Additional reporting by Larry Celona
