The city ripped a delusional 13-year-old NYC girl from her family, then failed to monitor the troubled child as she repeatedly fled her foster homes — until she finally committed suicide by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.
In a panicked bid to cover up its failures, the Administration for Children’s Services then allegedly backdated records and reports after the girl’s death, the traumatized family claimed in a heartbreaking lawsuit.
“ACS killed Jade Smith,” her mother Terri Nimmo, declared in legal papers.
“Over the course of ACS’s 20-month assault on the Nimmo family, the Nimmos lost their home, their jobs, and their 13-year-old daughter. They will never recover.”
A year after Jade’s stunning suicide in January 2023, a bumbling case worker made an unannounced visit to the family’s Brooklyn home and obliviously asked if Jade was “out for the moment,” the 35-year-old mom said in the litigation.
The mother “had nightmares and panic attacks about this cruel interaction for weeks.”
Jade was “an extremely gifted, creative, passionate child” and “prolific artist, always drawing and painting,” her family said in their Brooklyn Federal Court lawsuit against the city and several ACS employees.
But she was plagued by severe mental health issues — including Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder, dissociative identity disorder, and depression that required multiple hospital stays from the time she was 9.
She hallucinated a faceless “black figure” following her at school, and woke screaming in the night, convinced she was covered in bugs, according to legal papers. By 12 years old, she’d attempted suicide multiple times.
One apparent delusion changed the course of the family’s life.
In July 2022, her oldest daughter told Nimmo someone entered her bedroom in the night and groped her breasts and buttocks, then eventually claimed her stepfather — whose job as an overnight security guard took him out of the home in the wee hours — was responsible, according to the lawsuit.
The mom informed the girl’s biological father and stepdad, noting the child said she had been dreaming about a boy she had a crush on when the alleged abuse occurred.
But weeks later, Jade repeated the allegation to a friend, who told their parent. That parent called ACS.
Caseworkers showed up the same day — launching the family into hell, they alleged.
“ACS did not contact Jade’s therapist, psychiatrist, friends, or neighbors. It did not review her medical history,” the family said in the lawsuit. “It did not even attempt to confirm what medications she was prescribed nor what she discussed with her therapist at an appointment she attended after the alleged incident.”
Caseworkers ran to Brooklyn Family Court in September 2022, filed a neglect petition accusing stepfather Richard Nimmo of abusing Jade but failed to include the girls “extensive” mental health history “nor any other salient facts,” the family claimed.
“And thus began the systematic dismantling by ACS of every source of love, security, and comfort in Jade’s young life.”
Jade was placed with a grandparent — who lived in a single room occupancy home and couldn’t handle the increasingly unstable girl. She fled the home many times.
Meanwhile the family was broken up, with two siblings staying with the mom, but the stepdad ordered to stay away.
The agency’s records were “farcically inaccurate and incomplete,” failed to mention the hallucinations or runaway attempts, while case workers “dismissed” Nimmo’s concerns about her daughter’s safety, the family alleged.
The girl was placed in a different foster home. Nimmo last saw her daughter on Christmas Day, 2022.
“As soon as Jade saw her mother, she ran into her arms and told her how much she loved her,” according to the lawsuit.
Two weeks later, on Jan. 15, Jade fled that foster home. The next day her “body was found in the East River,” the suit said.
The same day, ACS rushed “back-dated case notes” into their records and “dramatically escalated its intrusions, seemingly desperate to somehow retroactively justify its actions in separating the family,” Nimmo alleged.
The agency then contacted Jade’s longtime therapist for the first time, while case workers repeatedly questioned her surviving sibling’s teachers and guidance counselor hunting for signs of neglect, the family claimed.
The belated probe of the Nimmos dragged on for more than a year, forcing the family to make it their “full-time job” to respond to the agency’s demands.
“Neither parent was able to sustain their employment. … Within months, the couple had lost not only their jobs but also their home. They moved into a shelter,” according to the lawsuit.
A family court judge cleared Jade’s parents in February 2024 of any wrongdoing, calling the abuse allegations “extremely difficult to believe” and describing Nimmo as “attentive as a parent could have been to Jade’s considerable mental health needs.”
“There will be a reckoning,” said the family, which is seeking unspecified damages.
ACS declined to comment on the litigation.
“The safety and well-being of New York City’s children and youth is our top priority. The loss of Jade Smith is a terrible tragedy. We offer our deepest condolences to the family,” a spokesperson said in a statement.