Aunt, Cousin Held in Death Of 5-Year-Old

Newsday

A 5-year-old girl was beaten to death in the home of  relatives who were chosen by city social workers to care for her, police said yesterday.Police charged the girl's aunt, Sophia Murray, 39, and the aunt's son, Robert, 18, both of 1350 Fifth Ave. in Harlem, with second-degree murder and endangering the welfare of a child.

Urandia Anderson died early Thursday after her aunt, who was certified by the city as a foster mother, brought the unconscious girl to Mount Sinai Hospital, police said. The aunt is the sister of Urandia's father.

Her aunt had cared for Urandia and her two younger brothers, ages 3 and 4, since March, 1989, when they were taken from their parents, who were not caring for them properly, police said. The two brothers have been removed from the home since Urandia's death. Six other brothers and sisters had been placed with other families at the same time that Urandia and her two brothers had been placed with the aunt, police said.

"This was a case of fatal child abuse syndrome. The abuse occurred over a period of time," said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the city medical examiner's office.

The girl had a broken leg, bruises and a lacerated liver, she said. Borakove said some of the injuries had been recently inflicted.

The city Human Resources Administration, which oversees children in foster care, declined to comment on the case, citing confidentiality rules.

The girl was one of 17,500 children placed with relatives by HRA's Child Welfare Administration under a rapidly expanding foster care program that has come under sharp criticism from the state.

Under the program, known as kinship foster care, which is several years old, children removed from the care of parents judged to be abusive or neglectful  go to live with relatives, who receive the same certification and the same stipends as other foster parents. They also are supposed to be under the supervision of social workers, as are regular foster parents. The Dinkins administration has said children should stay with relatives whenever possible and be placed with other foster families as a last resort.

The state Department of Social Services, in an audit this spring, said children were placed with relatives without even cursory inspections to see if apartments had heat or food in the refrigerator. The audit said relatives waited months or even years to receive stipends and often went unsupervised.

The number of reports of abuse or neglect of children in the program more than doubled, to 308, in the first five months of this year compared with the same period in 1989, when there were 129 cases, according to city officials. In the same period, the number of children in the program grew from 10,500 to nearly 17,000.

In a telephone interview late Thursday, HRA Commissioner Barbara Sabol said improvements had been made in the kinship foster care program since the audit. She said the foster parents are receiving more training, home inspections are done in a more timely manner, and the number of children supervised by each caseworker has been decreased.

Neighbors of the Murrays in the Martin Luther King Jr. Towers housing project said they had no inkling the little girl was being abused.