Hochul Hasn't Signed Bill Giving Investigators Access to ACS Death Records, Weeks After Bronx Teen Starved to Death

New York's Administration for Children's Services has been on investigators' radar for years over how it handles cases where kids under its watch wind up dead. A bill meant to force the agency to cooperate with those investigations passed the state legislature in June. As of this writing, Governor Kathy Hochul has neither signed it nor vetoed it, according to the New York Post.

The bill would give the city's Department of Investigation access to ACS records in cases involving a child or juvenile death, including files ACS currently withholds when it doesn't formally substantiate an abuse allegation. Under existing state law, DOI says it can't get the full picture in those cases. A DOI spokesperson told the Post the legislation would let investigators conduct what they called "rigorous and independent investigations."

Current DOI Commissioner Nadia Shihat and other officials have flagged roughly 20 deaths of children under ACS supervision over the past decade, according to the Post's reporting. The agency's alleged stonewalling on records is the reason DOI wants the law changed in the first place.

The Jarvis case

The bill's stalled status collided with a specific tragedy this year. Adonis Jarvis, a 16-year-old autistic boy, died in March after allegedly starving in a Bronx apartment, weighing just 59 pounds at death, according to prosecutors cited by the Post. His twin brother, also severely malnourished, survived.

Geneva Jarvis, 36, the boys' mother, and Denise Jarvis, 62, their grandmother, were charged with murder this week. Both have pleaded not guilty and are being held without bail at Rikers Island.

According to sources cited by the Post, the family had been on ACS's radar for more than a decade before the agency closed the case in 2024. The building superintendent, Denis Rivera, told the Post that around that time he watched city workers haul bag after bag of trash out of the apartment, enough that the sanitation department sent a special truck. After that, he said, nobody came back.

When Post reporters toured the apartment, they described it as a "hoarder hellhole," with rotting garbage, an unusable bathroom, and a trash-filled kitchen.

Geneva Jarvis had pulled the twins from a Bronx public school in January, reportedly because it lacked a paraprofessional and she said she struggled carrying her sons up and down stairs, according to sources cited by the Post. The city's Department of Education said it made "extensive efforts to engage and support the family over an extended period of time," and called the boy's death "heartbreaking."

What's known and unknown

Whether ACS caseworkers missed warning signs, mishandled the 2024 case closure, or acted within reasonable bounds given what they knew at the time is still murky, per the Post's own reporting. No findings have been made public establishing agency negligence in this specific case. The criminal case against the mother and grandmother is separate from any question of ACS's institutional performance, and both women are presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

What is documented is the pattern DOI is pointing to: about 20 deaths of ACS-involved children over ten years, and a legal structure that lets ACS decline to hand over full records when it hasn't substantiated abuse. That's the gap the pending legislation is designed to close. Whether closing it would have changed anything in the Jarvis case specifically is unknowable without the records DOI says it can't get.

Agencies like ACS handle enormous caseloads, operate under strict confidentiality rules meant to protect families and children from public exposure, and closing a case isn't inherently a red flag. The Reinvent Albany good-government group backs the DOI-access bill, but ACS itself has not been quoted defending its current recordkeeping practices in the available reporting, and no ACS official is named as directly responding to the stonewalling allegation.

Where it stands

Hochul has until the end of the year to act on the bill. Letting it sit unsigned isn't unusual for New York governors managing a backlog of legislation, and it isn't evidence of bad faith on her part. But the optics are rough: a bill written specifically to open up ACS death records has been pending for over a month while a case exemplifying exactly the kind of record-access dispute DOI describes has played out in the news.

The unresolved question is simple and specific: will Hochul sign the bill before year's end, and if she vetoes it, what alternative does her office propose to give DOI the access Commissioner Shihat says her investigators need? Neither the governor's office nor ACS has offered a public timeline or explanation in the reporting available.