N.Y. Mourns Death of Girl Who Fell Through Cracks in System

Both the mayor and the governor came Wednesday to help bury Elisa Izquierdo. The Daily News mourned her in a front page editorial. Strangers came to her wake and funeral and looked down in the open coffin at the 6-year-old covered with bruises.

Her mother couldn’t make it. She was in jail, held without bail on charges of torturing and murdering her daughter in a way that outraged this normally desensitized city.

Some crimes in New York City assume extra dimensions: The gang rape of a Central Park jogger attacked by youths merely because they had nothing else to do, or the murder of Kitty Genovese whose screams were ignored by dozens of neighbors. Now Elisa Izquierdo has joined that grim lexicon. The terribly battered little girl was both a victim of what police call a mother’s madness and an example of a system that is designed to preserve children but failed despite repeated warnings.

Elisa was a child who was befriended by a real live prince but even that didn’t help.

She was no ordinary child. She was born with cocaine in her bloodstream to Awilda Lopez, a crack addict. City officials awarded custody to Gustavo Izquierdo, a worker in a homeless shelter who had married Lopez. He was by all accounts a caring parent.

When she was old enough, Elisa was enrolled in a YMCA Montessori day school in downtown Brooklyn. With her dark hair and ready smile, she caught the eye of Prince Michael of Greece, a believer in Montessori education. The prince paid Elisa’s tuition and pledged to provide her with a private school education right through high school.

When Izquierdo died last year of cancer, Lopez claimed her daughter. She was opposed in court proceedings by the prince, members of the Montessori school’s staff and some of Elisa’s relatives, who urged a judge in Brooklyn Family Court to award care of Elisa to Izquierdo’s sister.

But social workers found the Lopez home to be neat and that other children of Lopez’ and her new husband seemed to be cared for adequately.

Lopez gained custody. Soon Elisa’s mother turned down the prince’s scholarship for her daughter to attend Brooklyn Friends Academy, a prestigious private school. She placed Elisa in a public school where staff members began to notice bruises on the little girl. Somehow their complaints to authorities fell through the cracks.

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, police charge that Elisa’s mother slammed her daughter into a wall so hard that blood vessels burst in her child’s brain. She died two days later.