In D.C., a Toddler Died of Hunger and Thirst. Why Didn’t Anybody Save Her?

The Washington Post

12:34 JST, July 26, 2025

Daniel Skinner felt a grating sense of unease as he sent another text to Ebony Washington, the mother of their 20-month-old daughter.

“At least let me know you and Kemy is ok,” he wrote in early January.

No answer.

Almost two weeks earlier, Skinner, 37, had sent another message, offering to take Kemy to his mother’s house at Christmas, to give Ebony a respite from solo parenting. He got no response that day and none the next, when he texted, “Merry Christmas.” Nor when he knocked on her door and phoned again and again.

“Ebony what’s going on,” he texted, this time on Jan. 15.

Three days later, in a Northwest Washington high-rise, Skinner’s mother, Kineta Johnson, and two police officers walked to Ebony’s apartment at the end of a long, carpeted hallway. When a building worker opened the door for them, Johnson would say later, “you could smell death.”

Mother and child were on a bedroom floor, deceased for days, possibly weeks, according to investigators, who found no evidence of foul play. In May, the D.C. medical examiner’s office reported that Ebony, 38, had overdosed on an array of illicit drugs and that Kemy, left uncared for, had died of starvation and dehydration.

The death of a child from neglect or abuse invariably provokes questions about the circumstances that led to the fatal moment, about the potential culpability of parents, guardians, caregivers and government agencies, and whether a timely intervention – a phone call or a visit – might have averted tragedy.

Months after the deaths of Ebony and Kemy Washington, the questions linger. How did it happen that a toddler perished from hunger and thirst in America’s capital city? Why didn’t someone save her?

Beyond relatives, friends, police and a few people in the D.C. government, the deaths went largely unnoticed, lost in the crush of pre-inauguration news. The public record in the case is sparse.

Who failed this child? Was it only Ebony?

“Kemy was a baby with a sick mother who shouldn’t have been alone with her,” said Jamice Steele, a cousin of Ebony’s. “She shouldn’t have been left in her care. They knew she was struggling with drugs.”

“Why was she allowed to keep Kemy?” Steele said.

The D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, tasked with protecting abused and neglected youngsters, was aware of Ebony’s troubled history as a parent.

A couple of years before Kemy’s birth, CFSA alleged in court that Ebony had neglected her then-only daughter, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of privacy rules.

A judge removed that child from Ebony’s care in 2023 and awarded guardianship of her to Steele, 45, a management analyst who lives in Maryland. How CFSA discovered the neglect of Ebony’s firstborn isn’t publicly known because such cases are confidential in D.C. courts. A CFSA spokesperson said the agency is prevented by law from commenting on specific families. Lawyers in the guardianship case also declined to comment.

While that daughter, now 10, was rescued from neglect, nobody successfully intervened to protect Kemy, even though her mother’s erratic behavior and history of intermittent drug and alcohol abuse worried those who knew her.

In 2024, months before police found Ebony and Kemy, Johnson said, she twice phoned CFSA, once anonymously, to report her concerns about Kemy’s safety. “I have been ringing the alarm since Kemy was born,” she said in an interview. “There were things I saw, and I’d say, ‘What the hell is this?’”

Keena Blackmon, a CFSA spokesperson, said in an email that the agency searched its database and could find “no record of any call reporting allegations of abuse or neglect for the decedent child.” Without such allegations, Blackmon wrote, CFSA “has no legal authority to separate a child from their home,” regardless of the parent’s “past history with the agency.”

That no one interceded successfully on Kemy’s behalf reflects the limits of the D.C. child welfare system’s reach. Even when CFSA caseworkers make home visits, “it’s challenging if Mom says everything is fine,” said Marie Cohen, a former member of the D.C. Child Fatality Review Committee who blogs about the child welfare system. “The parent doesn’t want to lose their child so they’re going to tell you what you want to hear – ‘I’m not using.’”

Like his mother, Daniel Skinner said, he was growing more worried about Kemy’s safety, months before Ebony stopped responding to his texts and phone calls.

But sharing his concerns with CFSA was not an option for him, he said. He was afraid that involving the agency would infuriate Ebony, whose older child already had been placed with Steele. “The way Ebony was, if she got any whiff, she probably would have hid with my daughter,” he said. “I didn’t want that.”

Skinner, who works and lives at a Salvation Army facility in Maryland, said he had resolved to save money so he could get an apartment and care for Kemy himself.

And he had another reason for not calling CFSA, he said: As a child, he had spent time in foster care, and he was determined to spare Kemy the emotional tumult that he had endured, landing in a stranger’s home.

“I wasn’t about to have my daughter in the system,” he said.

Now he can’t help but imagine Kemy, with her dimpled cheeks and almond eyes, suffering as her brief life ebbed away. How long did she survive with her mother dead? How loudly might she have cried?

Did anybody hear her?

Ebony and Kemy lived in a two-bedroom apartment at the Kenmore, a building five blocks south of Chevy Chase Circle. The neighbor in the adjoining unit, answering when a reporter rang the bell, said, “Sorry,” and shut her door. So did another tenant a few yards down the hall, shaking his head when asked whether he had heard a child crying.

On Jan. 18, when Johnson and the police arrived at the Kenmore, they saw a court summons for an upcoming eviction hearing affixed to Ebony’s door. The city had been paying almost all of her $2,707-a-month rent through a low-income subsidy program. Ebony, who was unemployed and had lived at the Kenmore since 2017, was responsible for $105 per month. Including late fees, she owed $1,365, court records show.

Johnson also saw, hanging from the doorknob, a notice left a month earlier by a D.C. Housing Authority inspector who had come “to ensure that your dwelling is decent, safe, sanitary and in good condition for your family.”

Maybe it was too late for Ebony and Kemy by then, at 10:27 a.m. Dec. 20, when the inspector visited.

“SORRY WE MISSED YOU!” the notice read.

Lives filled with turmoil

No one who played a significant role in Kemy’s life had traveled an easy path to the moment when she was born, on April 20, 2023, at MedStar Washington Hospital Center.

Ebony grew up in Southeast Washington and attended Ballou High School. She was 12 when her mother died, an aunt said at Ebony’s funeral. Her father also died when she was young. She was raised from an early age by her father’s wife, Margaret Ford, who, after speaking with a reporter immediately after Ebony and Kemy were found, declined to be further interviewed.

“This is something that we’ll never get over,” Ford wrote in a text. “We need time [to] grieve.”

Johnson, Skinner’s mother, was 13 when Daniel was born. For a time, mother and son were in foster care. After Johnson reached adulthood, they lived together in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

By his account, Skinner was an angry, emotionally unstable teenager who struggled with the responsibility of caring for two younger siblings. At 13, he said, he left home and, when not behind bars, spent most of the next two decades or so “on the streets,” sometimes staying with friends, sometimes sleeping in the stairwells of apartment buildings.

“I was like a dressed-up trash can,” he said of those years, his angular face now accented by a thin mustache and a tuft of hair on his chin.

At 17, Skinner said, he was arrested on armed robbery and assault charges in Maryland. He said he was found not guilty and the case was expunged. Over the following six years, he wound up in handcuffs several more times, accused of marijuana possession, burglary and other offenses. Some cases were dismissed, court records show, and some ended in convictions.

His nadir may have occurred Aug. 8, 2010, while he was on probation for burglary. High on the hallucinogenic drug PCP, he and a juvenile accomplice were arrested after pulling knives while jumping a man near the Southwest Washington waterfront, according to Skinner and court records. The two ran off with the victim’s cellphone, credit cards and a single dollar bill.

After Skinner pleaded guilty, his attorney sought to have his 38-month sentence reduced. In a court motion, the attorney described his client as a “troubled young man who is a product of antisocial norms,” including a father who had been incarcerated for most of Skinner’s life and a mother who had been the age of a middle-schooler when she gave birth to him.

In rejecting the motion, then-D.C. Superior Court Judge Ann O’Regan Keary expressed sympathy for Skinner’s “difficult childhood” while describing him as a “risk to the safety of the community.” The judge added, “The court continues to be concerned that the defendant claimed he was too high to recall the events of the robbery.”

He served just over three years in prison, after which he resumed a nomadic existence in the District. Skinner said he knew Ebony from their younger years in Southeast, and he reconnected with her when they ran into each other in 2018. “She would bring me food,” he said, recalling meals of chicken, fish and macaroni and cheese, back when he was sleeping in the stairwell of a building on South Capitol Street.

Ebony, too, had compiled an arrest record by then, court records show, including charges of prostitution, possession of PCP, driving while impaired, unlawful entry and theft.

In the fall of 2015, almost four months after her first daughter was born (Skinner is not the father of that child), Ebony moved into the New Day Transitional House for Women and Children, records show.

Her treatment plan, which included weekly Narcotics Anonymous meetings, described her as a “recovering PCP user” who had been diagnosed with a “mood disorder” and had been recently released from another residential treatment program, according to a copy of the plan that her former case manager, Jade Coleman, provided to The Washington Post.

“When I first met her, she was so stressed out, saying, ‘These people are trying to take my baby,’” Coleman said, referring to CFSA. “She had some troubles with drugs.” Coleman said Ebony became drug-free at New Day and seemed to be a “really good mother.”

As part of her recovery, Ebony underwent counseling and drug testing and participated in a Superior Court pilot program established to help parents reunite with children who were subjects of neglect complaints. In 2016, Coleman wrote to the court recommending Ebony for a diploma, praising her as “a model resident” of New Day with a “remarkable ability to adapt and show positive improvement.”

At the graduation ceremony, where Ebony was singled out for the “Most Changed” award, she wore a cap and gown as she posed for photos with four other mothers who got diplomas.

“I just remember her being happy that she graduated,” said Coleman, who attended the ceremony, an event chronicled at the time by WTOP-FM (103.5), a news radio station.

“She thanked me for encouraging her,” Coleman recalled. “She came a long way.”

One child saved, another in peril

The following year, in 2017, Ebony moved into the apartment at the Kenmore, court records show. Yet whatever level of stability she had achieved did not last.

In January 2021, CFSA filed a neglect complaint against Ebony in Superior Court, according to the person familiar with the matter. The focus of the agency’s concern was Ebony’s daughter, her only child at the time.

“She was taken from Ebony because of drug use,” Steele said. “Ebony loved her daughter, she really did. … They all knew that she needed help. Nobody could make Ebony get help.”

While the case unfolded in court, Ebony faced another type of legal challenge. Police in Arlington County, Virginia, charged her with public intoxication in October 2021, according to court records.

Steele said that during the guardianship proceedings, she learned that Ebony was pregnant, and she shared that information with lawyers in the case. On a conference call with the parties, Steele said, the presiding magistrate judge questioned Ebony regarding “speculation about her being pregnant.”

“Ebony wouldn’t respond,” Steele said.

Skinner said Ebony texted him a photo of her rounded belly back then and announced she was carrying a child. Sometimes Ebony would tell him he was the father, Skinner said, and sometimes she would say, teasingly, “This ain’t your baby” and “It’s the devil’s baby.”

On April 20, 2023, with the guardianship case still pending, Ebony called Skinner to say she was about to give birth, and he hurried to Washington Hospital Center.

By then, Skinner was the full-time, live-in manager of a Salvation Army residential rehabilitation facility in Hyattsville, Maryland, where he had completed a six-month sobriety program in 2021. He has been drug- and alcohol-free since Aug. 17 of that year, he said, and is enrolled in a training program to become a recovery coach. Fatherhood was something he said he had begun fantasizing about in prison, when he would write letters to an imaginary child, a son or daughter not yet conceived.

“It was the best thing to happen to me,” he said of Kemy’s birth.

Skinner’s mother, a human resources specialist, also went to the hospital, to visit her new granddaughter and to meet Ebony. “I didn’t know anything about her,” Johnson, now 50, said of Ebony. “I never met her until the day she had the baby.”

As Ebony was giving birth, then-Magistrate Judge Adrienne Noti was finalizing her guardianship decision in the case of the older daughter. It’s unclear whether Noti knew the truth about Ebony’s pregnancy before she issued her ruling, which was entered in the court record on April 25, 2023, according to the person familiar with the matter.

At that point, Kemy was 5 days old. Even if the judge had been aware of Ebony’s baby, her options would have been limited. She could not have removed Kemy from Ebony’s care without someone filing another neglect complaint – the same reason that CFSA said it could not act.

Marie Cohen, the blogger and former member of the fatality review committee, said at least five states have legal mechanisms that allow child welfare agencies to “try to identify at-risk babies at birth for an investigation or assessment” under specified circumstances, without a neglect complaint. “I do think DC should have something like this,” she said in an email. “I like the idea of including anyone who [previously] had a child removed because of abuse or neglect.”

Delighted with her infant granddaughter, Johnson said, she and her own mother tried to build a relationship with Ebony, promising to help with child care, clothing and anything else she needed. But Ebony seemed wary, Johnson said.

“‘We don’t know your story, and whatever your story is, we’re your tribe,’” Johnson recalled telling her. “We were going to take care of her. We said, ‘You just tell us what you need.’ She just looked at us like we were strange and different.”

In the ensuing months, Skinner said, he often visited Ebony and Kemy at the Kenmore, regularly bringing groceries from a nearby Safeway. At one point in 2023, he said, he gave Ebony $1,500 to pay delinquent rent. Another time, he said, he offered to move into the apartment to help with expenses and parenting – but she rejected the offer.

Johnson worried that Ebony always seemed short of money and could be hard to reach because her cellphone number kept changing. When Johnson did get hold of her, she said, Ebony often cursed her out. “Check on your own child,” she recalled Ebony saying. “Stop calling me. What do you keep bugging me for?”

Johnson said she conveyed her concerns to her son, who “told me I was making her uncomfortable and him uncomfortable.”

Skinner said he thought his mother was “trying to take control of my daughter. And I didn’t want that.”

In June 2024, two months after Kemy’s first birthday, Johnson said, she panicked after not reaching or seeing Ebony and Kemy for several weeks. That was when she made her first call to CFSA, she said. She said she isn’t sure of the date because she did not keep notes and placed the call from a random phone at her workplace to conceal her identity.

But she recalled giving Ebony’s name and address to the person who answered, telling them: “She has a baby there. No one has been able to reach her for three weeks and we don’t know what to do.”

“The person said the first thing we should do is call the police, and they could file a report for possible neglect and have a social worker go check,” Johnson said. But she said she decided against contacting the police because she was worried about antagonizing her son.

CFSA’s child protection hotline received 20,978 calls from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024, according to the agency. About 4,800 of the calls concerned existing cases or led to new investigations, while 936 calls were referred to other agencies, and 15,200 calls – 72 percent of hotline reports – were deemed unworthy of follow-up.

Three months later, in September, Johnson said, Ebony called her, saying she was “stressed out” and needed a parenting break. Could Johnson take Kemy off her hands for a while?

“I’m on my way,” Johnson said she replied.

Johnson drove from her home in Southern Maryland to D.C. and met Ebony and Kemy outside the Kenmore. Ebony was rambling semi-coherently, Johnson recalled, venting at one point about the frustration she felt at not seeing her older daughter. She appeared to be “under the influence of something,” Johnson said, “the way her eyes looked, glassy and far out.”

Kemy, barefoot, was clad in a torn onesie and pants that were too small. “This was the one time that I saw Kemy and she wasn’t clean,” Johnson said. Before driving away with her then-17-month-old granddaughter, she said, she told Ebony she’d call her in a couple of days.

“She said, ‘Don’t,’” Johnson recalled. “She wanted me to keep Kemy.”

Alarmed, Johnson called CFSA again, this time from a phone at a market near her home, she said. She said she told the agency she was “concerned not only for the baby’s safety but the safety of her mother.” Johnson said she does not recall giving her name but told the person she spoke with that she was the baby’s grandmother and left her phone number. She said she never heard back from anyone.

A few days after Johnson picked up Kemy, Ebony said she was “feeling better” and wanted the child back, Johnson said. Around this time, Skinner said, he brought Kemy home to Ebony after a visit and encountered a stranger in Ebony’s living room, rolling a marijuana joint.

“Look, man, Ebony don’t need to be doing that,” Skinner recalled telling the visitor as the two left the apartment. The man told Skinner that Ebony had been “freebasing” lately, meaning smoking a vaporized drug. The man didn’t mention what kind of drug, but Skinner figured it was MDMA, or “molly,” the active ingredient in the euphoria-inducing party pill known as ecstasy. Before he got sober, Skinner said, he and Ebony had often smoked PCP together. But he knew she also liked molly.

He feared for Kemy’s safety, he said, and resolved to “get myself together” and find an apartment he could afford for himself and his daughter.

“I was trying my best to get to a place where I could get her,” he said.

‘What could I have done?’

Kineta Johnson’s dread intensified that Saturday in January as the maintenance worker opened the door to Ebony’s apartment and the police officers went inside.

Johnson waited at the apartment’s entrance, praying that Kemy was safe, that the weeks of silence had been a misunderstanding, that it was another instance of Ebony being Ebony.

Then she heard one of the officers gasp.

When police find human remains and there’s no sign of foul play, the investigation usually concludes quickly. Because the time of death isn’t vital information in these cases, often no effort is made to approximate it scientifically. The manner of death is typically listed as accidental, a suicide or natural causes, and the case is closed.

How long Ebony and Kemy had been deceased isn’t clear. Steele said an investigator told her that the condition of Ebony’s body suggested she had died well before Kemy. The bodies were taken to the D.C. morgue for autopsies and later to a funeral home. “I asked to come in for a viewing,” Steele said, recalling her wish to see her cousin for a final time. “And they said, ‘Oh, no’ – that if I was able to see her, I wouldn’t recognize her.”

In May, responding to a query from The Post, the medical examiner’s office emailed a brief statement about the causes and manner of their deaths. The full findings of an autopsy in D.C. are legally off limits to the public except for the decedent’s immediate family.

Ebony had overdosed on a mix of MDMA, cocaine, ethanol and the animal sedative xylazine, called “tranc” on the streets. Kemy had died from a lack of food and water. Their deaths were ruled accidental.

For those who knew Ebony and Kemy, the medical examiner’s conclusions confirmed what they had suspected, but the results did nothing to settle their thoughts and questions.

“What could I have done?” Skinner said. “Is it me? Am I cursed?”

He had chosen not to call CFSA when Kemy was alive, but he said he doesn’t dwell on that now.

“Nothing is going to bring her back,” he said of his daughter.

Steele, the guardian of Ebony’s older daughter, said Kemy is often on her mind.

“How did the baby slip through the cracks?” she wondered. “I think about it mornings and nights. She was in there for days? How was she feeling? Did nobody hear her?”

After talking with a reporter twice and exchanging texts, Steele stopped answering her phone and responding to questions.

In her last message, in mid-May, she wrote that she had not intended to put “Ebony in a bad light.”

“I’m more upset with the system,” she said.

On the frigid morning of Feb. 5, as mourners arrived at Fort Lincoln Funeral Home & Cemetery, Skinner sat in the front row of a viewing room, waiting for Kemy’s service to begin. He stared straight ahead at his daughter’s open pink casket.

His mother, having fought through grief to help arrange the service, busied herself helping friends and relatives find seats. Co-workers of Skinner’s from the Salvation Army were there. So was Ebony’s family; a memorial service for her was set for a couple of weeks later.

Steele had posted a GoFundMe plea for money to “help lay Ebony and baby Kemy to rest,” and donations had totaled $2,952, about a third of the goal. Funeral programs had been printed with a cover photo of Kemy smiling, maybe giggling, and pointing up at something that seemed to delight her.

“The hard question to ask is ‘Why?’” the Rev. Everette Bradford said in his eulogy. “Because ‘Why?’ might not have an answer.”

“‘Why?’” he added, “might not have an answer that’s satisfying to what’s inside your soul.”

Then, beneath an overcast sky, the mourners made their way in the cold to a nearby grave, where they sang “This Little Light of Mine” as Kemy’s coffin was lowered into the ground.