A Baby Girl’s Bath Becomes a Young Couple’s Nightmare

The 11-month-old girl stood in the tub, playing in shallow water with a 2-year-old girl, both looked after by a teenage mother home alone. The last moments of normal life in the third-floor apartment on Classon Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, ended that way, with one young mother, a pot of rice on the stove down the hall and two children in shallow water that would not be shallow enough.

“It was an accident,” said the mother, Jovanna Shiriver.

She is just 18 but looked even younger last month in her new surroundings, a visiting room at a jail on Rikers Island, her hair pulled in pigtails. Short and thin and draped in an adult-size gray jumpsuit, she looked less like an inmate than a girl in a schoolhouse play about jail. She said, “I don’t belong here.”

On July 3, Ms. Shiriver was bathing her daughter, 11-month-old Smeily Ordoñez, and her boyfriend’s 2-year-old sister when she stepped away to stir rice for the children. She returned to find Smeily under the water. When she and neighbors could not revive her, they called 911.

The baby was placed on life support and, in the month since, has remained hospitalized on a ventilator. She was transferred last week from Schneider Children’s Hospital in New Hyde Park, on Long Island, to Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, in Westchester County, which specializes in medical and physical rehabilitation.

Her father, Jorge Ordoñez, 19, is hopeful. “They’re doing, like, physical therapy,” he said. “When they finish with that she’s coming straight to my house.”

Ms. Shiriver has been indicted on two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, a misdemeanor, and two counts of reckless endangerment, a felony; she has been behind bars since the day of the accident. A law enforcement official said she could face additional charges if the baby died.

While there are no special lawbooks for when to bring charges in what no one doubts is a tragic mistake, in the view of prosecutors, Ms. Shiriver’s moments at the stove constituted a criminal act.

“There are all sorts of shades of gray, and that’s why you can’t have hard and fast rules,” said Ama Dwimoh, chief of the Crimes Against Children Bureau of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

“People have to understand that there is a duty owed to children by the very nature of who they are,” Ms. Dwimoh said. “When you look at it from that perspective, you can see what is deemed criminal negligence as opposed to bad parenting.”

Interviews with Ms. Shiriver, her neighbors and Mr. Ordoñez tell one family’s version of every parent’s nightmare, and how that nightmare is both a cautionary tale and something of a legal case study.

It was around 2 p.m. on July 3. Ms. Shiriver was home alone with two children for the first time, she said in an interview on July 25. The 2-year-old’s mother was in the hospital, she said. Ms. Shiriver lived in the apartment with her boyfriend, his mother and stepfather, his 14-year-old sister and the 2-year-old, neighbors said.

Little Smeily was bathed every day, and had to be watched carefully, Ms. Shiriver said. “She moves around too much,” she said. But that day, Ms. Shiriver was feeling overwhelmed, she said.

“I was doing everything,” she said. “I was cooking and doing housework.”

The children were standing in what Ms. Shiriver described as low water when she became distracted. “I could smell the rice burning,” she said. She went to the kitchen, down the hall from the bathroom, and stirred. She said she left the children alone for five minutes. She said she was “worried,” even as she continued stirring.

When she returned, she saw only the 2-year-old standing quietly, she said. “She never said anything,” Ms. Shiriver said.

Smeily was lying on her back, she said. The water just barely covered her face. Describing the depth, Ms. Shiriver placed her hand on her face, as if that were the water, just covering it.

She snatched the baby and ran to a bedroom, trying to revive Smeily. The apartment had no telephone, and the family often used the neighbor’s upstairs; that is where Ms. Shiriver ran next with Smeily. The neighbor, Earl Brown, 43, tried to revive her with C.P.R. They called the police at 2:02 p.m.

Detectives spoke with Ms. Shiriver about what had happened, and then arrested her. “They brought me here,” she said, nodding toward the walls at the Rose M. Singer Center, a jail for women on Rikers Island.

Her neighbors were surprised by the arrest. “What’s an 18-year-old know about raising two kids?” Mr. Brown asked. “Taking care of hers and looking out for another one — she was doing what she thought was right. It was a little misunderstanding. It was a little bad mistake she made. She’s a child herself.”

Mr. Brown’s companion, Barbara Washington, 35, recalled a scare with her own son in a bathtub years ago. “He was sitting there, and went right under the water,” she said. “His body was slippery. He slipped. He just caught his breath. He was scared.”

“I was a young mother myself,” she said. “My mother taught me.” She thought of Ms. Shiriver, and said, “She didn’t have anyone to teach her.”

The neighbors sometimes see Mr. Ordoñez, the baby’s father, as he comes and goes for his construction job, and they ask about Smeily. “She’s stable,” Mr. Brown said. “She’s just, like, in a little coma.”

Ms. Washington said, “The machine is doing most of the work.”

On July 24, Mr. Ordoñez spoke to a reporter as he arrived home from work. He wore a tank top and baggy jeans over his thin frame, with an iPod strapped to one ropy biceps and peach fuzz on his upper lip, and he spoke hesitantly, guarded, in a raspy voice.

“She’s sick right now,” he said of Ms. Shiriver. “The food in there is nasty.” He has visited her and placed money in her jail account so she can buy soup. “She can call me. I’m the one there for her right now,” he said.

As he opened the apartment’s door, the sound of running water could be heard inside, even though no one was home. He said the faucet in the tub was broken and ran all day. It is a constant reminder of the five minutes that scattered his young family to a jail cell and a hospital crib. It is one of the reasons he is moving to Far Rockaway, Queens, he said.

He said he hoped to get custody of Smeily when she was released from the hospital, and the move was in part for her. “She needs her own room,” he said.

Ms. Dwimoh, the assistant district attorney, has spent 10 years prosecuting crimes against children. She declined to discuss Ms. Shiriver’s case because it was not complete, but recalled past cases of neglect.

When investigating the injury or death of a child who has been left unattended, she said, prosecutors focus on the nature of the risk taken by the parent, and the nature of the result. In such cases, the words “foreseeable” and “preventable” are often invoked in debate.

State law gives a guideline for distinguishing between criminal negligence and flighty parenting, Ms. Dwimoh said: “Is the risk of such nature and degree that the failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe?”

In practical terms, that leads to a series of questions: Does the family have a case history with child welfare agencies? How old was the child? Where was the child left? How many children were left together unattended? Did they have known behavioral problems? Were they left to care for younger children?

Ms. Dwimoh recalled a case she chose not to prosecute: At a two-story home in Brooklyn, a mother was caring for several children while also allowing visitors in for an open house when her 2-year-old child got out a basement door. The child was found dead, floating in a backyard pool.

“Was that deemed criminal?” Ms. Dwimoh said. “No. Was that deemed a tragic accident? Absolutely.”

In that case, she said, prosecutors determined that the mother could not have foreseen her 2-year-old’s ability to get out of the house.

In tub-drowning cases, she said, age can be an important factor. Ms. Dwimoh has handled cases involving drowned children ranging from 4 months to 3 ½ years, and has weighed factors including whether the child was placed in the tub or climbed in. In 2003, a 10-month-old girl drowned in a bathtub of her family’s home in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, while her mother talked on the telephone. The mother had been bathing her son, not quite 2 years old, and left his side for as long as 15 minutes, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said at the time. The girl had been playing in the living room, and made her way to the tub as the boy climbed out. The mother was not charged with any crime.

In a similar case in Brooklyn, a 9-year-old girl was dancing and playing all over the house while her parents watched television. In the bathroom, the girl strangled herself while playing with a shower hose, Ms. Dwimoh recalled. Again, no charges were filed.

“There are so many variations of what can happen,” she said, “and that’s why you can’t have a hard and fast rule.”

Ms. Shiriver’s lawyer, Carl H. Becker, said that this was his first drowning case involving a bathtub, but that he had represented clients accused in pool drownings. “We’re going to fight the charges,” he said. He described Ms. Shiriver as “despondent” and on suicide watch at the jail on Rikers Island.

Ms. Shiriver, in the visiting room, said she was on no such watch. She speaks to few people, although some of the older inmates have been looking out for her, she said. She watches a lot of television, calls her boyfriend and buys her soup on Fridays.

During an interview, she looked up every time the visiting room door opened. “Jorge said he was coming today,” she said. Of the baby, she said, “Jorge said she’s O.K. She can’t come home yet. They won’t tell him why.”

Children visiting their mothers in the jail shouted and squealed. Corrections officers made funny faces and cooed at the little ones in the visiting room, furnished with bright plastic chairs.

Another inmate, a heavy woman who had been loudly telling a man visiting her that she didn’t care that he had met someone else, paused and turned to her left, to the 18-year-old with the unlined face and the dusting of acne and the baggy jail grays.

She did a double take, and said, “She’s a baby.”