{"id":245051,"date":"2026-05-27T12:46:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/245051\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T12:46:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:46:18","slug":"deadly-child-abuse-torture-reveals-nys-willful-blindness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/245051\/","title":{"rendered":"Deadly child-abuse ‘torture’ reveals NY’s willful blindness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Little Jor\u2019Dynn Duncan <\/a>should never have gone to live with Emily Kelly, the Long Island woman who allegedly tortured the 7-year-old girl to death.<\/p>\n

Kelly, along with her mother and her adult daughter, all deserve to be jailed for life after they tied up Jor\u2019Dynn in a bathtub and left 90 injuries on her body before the child ultimately suffered cardiac arrest in December.<\/p>\n

It was a house of horrors \u2014 and Suffolk County Child Protective Services placed her there.<\/p>\n

Of all the foster homes in New York, why did child welfare officials and family court judges think Kelly\u2019s was appropriate?<\/p>\n

Because even though she was not Jor\u2019Dynn\u2019s blood relative, Kelly was deemed \u201ckin\u201d under CPS rules.<\/p>\n

Jor\u2019Dynn\u2019s mother lost custody of the child a few years ago, and her father is serving up to four years at Sing Sing for burglary.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNaomi Schaefer Riley<\/p>\n

Kelly is the father\u2019s fianc\u00e9e, so CPS placed Jor\u2019Dynn in her home in December 2024.<\/p>\n

A month later, CPS was already investigating maltreatment there \u2014 yet a judge granted Kelly full custody in April 2025.<\/p>\n

When Jor\u2019Dynn missed approximately 40 days of school that year, Kelly made up a string of excuses to hide the abuse, prosecutors say.<\/p>\n

There were other red flags: Kelly\u2019s one-year-old son reportedly also died in 1997 as a result of abuse. Her boyfriend was sentenced to 23 years in prison for the killing.<\/p>\n

And she had a baby daughter who died in 1994 under cloudy circumstances.<\/p>\n

Only willful ignorance can explain why multiple officials thought Emily Kelly\u2019s home would be a good placement for Jor\u2019Dynn.<\/p>\n

Why didn\u2019t they protect this child?<\/p>\n

One reason is that child welfare agencies\u2019 first priority is placing children with \u201ckin,\u201d a preference that activists, academics and state and federal officials of both parties have all reinforced.<\/p>\n

Intuitively, of course, it makes sense to place a child with an aunt or a grandmother if parents can\u2019t care for them.<\/p>\n

But the dysfunction present in a nuclear family<\/a> is often present in the extended family as well.<\/p>\n

Addiction, mental illness, domestic violence and child maltreatment are commonly intergenerational problems.<\/p>\n

So the left\u2019s desire to keep kids with people who share their skin color, combined with the right\u2019s interest in saving money and limiting government\u2019s reach, have created the perfect storm.<\/p>\n

The Biden administration told states they could create looser standards for licensing kin foster families \u2014 and the Trump administration reiterated this in a recent \u201cDear Colleague\u201d memo.<\/p>\n

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Both claim they want to eliminate bureaucratic hurdles that prevent family members from caring for children whose parents cannot.<\/p>\n

But if they\u2019re unnecessary hurdles, they can be eliminated for relatives and nonrelatives alike.<\/p>\n

The truth is that agencies already have plenty of incentive to place children with extended family, or even \u201cfictive kin\u201d \u2014 anyone who knows the child.<\/p>\n

Relatives are generally paid less, if they\u2019re paid at all.<\/p>\n

And caseworkers know they\u2019d be in for far more blame if anything goes wrong in a placement with a non-relative foster family<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But there are serious reasons for concern when placing a child with extended family.<\/p>\n

A report this spring from Oregon found that the state\u2019s rate of abuse of children in foster care had reached an all-time high \u2014 after a three-year stretch, between 2022 and 2025, when the percentage of kids placed with relatives almost doubled, from 18.8% to 36.1%.<\/p>\n

An analysis of child-abuse fatalities in Minnesota from 2014 to 2022 found that six of the seven deaths in foster care occurred in kinship homes.<\/p>\n

Advocates for more kinship care \u2014 New Jersey stopped recruiting nonrelative foster parents entirely a few years ago, claiming that kin would be able to handle 100% of the demand for foster homes \u2014 say they\u2019re not sacrificing safety.<\/p>\n

But Illinois recently loosened its rules about background checks for kin placements: Authorities are clearly willing to look the other way.<\/p>\n

As the Kelly case moves into criminal court, the temptation will be to focus only on the women who committed these terrible acts.<\/p>\n

But it would be a grave mistake to ignore the systems that failed Jor\u2019Dynn.<\/p>\n

Weirdly, Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine made a point of saying that \u201cCPS is not to blame for Jor\u2019Dynn\u2019s placement with Kelly,\u201d because it was \u201cdone by a judge.\u201d<\/p>\n

But CPS officials, not judges, make foster care recommendations; judges confirm their choices.<\/p>\n

Neither acts alone.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too late for us to save Jor\u2019Dynn from the unimaginable torture she endured.<\/p>\n

But to honor her memory, we must keep it from happening again.<\/p>\n

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Little Jor\u2019Dynn Duncan should never have gone to live with Emily Kelly, the Long Island woman who allegedly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8301,2882,68820,95643,95644,238,9,11,10,299,773],"class_list":["post-245051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-child-abuse","tag-child-endangerment","tag-child-protective-service","tag-foster-children","tag-foster-system","tag-murders","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-opinion","tag-suffolk-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}