Last year, a severely malnourished 4-year-old girl—weighing a scant 18 pounds—was found dead in her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment with bruises all over her body. A blame war ensued over the death of Marchella Pierce, but mother Carlotta Brett-Pierce was arrested and charged with her death. And a detective testified at a hearing yesterday that Brett-Pierce admitted to him that she tied up the little girl several times: “Her words were, ‘She was acting crazy and her little ass was wilding out,’” said Detective Matthew Lamendola.
Lamendola added that he listened in on an interview of Brett-Pierce’s 5-year-old son, Tymel, who told another detective that his mother beat Marchella with a belt and stuffed her full of pills. The malnourished little girl had been found with marks around her arms and wrists, suggesting she had been tied up, and also had drugs in her system. Prosecutors have previously said that Brett-Pierce force-fed her sleeping pills and sometimes beat her: "The mother tied up the child because she would get up in the night and eat food...and make a mess."
In addition to Brett-Pierce, grandmother Loretta Brett has been charged with manslaughter. Two former Administration of Children's Services (ACS) employees were indicted on charges of criminally negligent homicide, which was the first time in state history that welfare workers were charged with the death of a child. The ACS Commissioner during the incident, John Mattingly, also resigned, though supposedly not because of the scrutiny his agency came under in the wake of Marchella's death.
And this fall, Marchella's father, Tyrone Pierce, sued the city and ACS for failing to act on behalf of the little girl despite "knowledge of the threats of physical, mental and emotional abuse being waged on [the child]."
