Four children in voucher-funded apartments died of abuse or neglect in less than two years

Last month I wrote about the death of 10-month old Kemy Washington late in 2024 or early in 2025. She died of starvation and dehydration, trapped in her Northwest apartment with the body of her mother, who had died after consuming a cocktail of drugs. But comments on the Washington Post’s story revealed something even more shocking. Kemy was one of four children who died between February 2023 and January 2025 in voucher-funded apartments located on Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenue NW.

The Washington Post story, which included my comments, focused on whether CFSA could have prevented Kemy’s suffering and death, since it had already removed Kemy’s sibling from her mother and received two calls from her grandmother. I explained that the District would have to implement a policy that identified new babies born to parents who previously had a child removed for abuse or neglect. But it was not until I read the over 600 comments on the article that I learned another agency may have been much better positioned than CFSA to save Kemy. A reader calling herself “Sibylline” revealed the shocking truth:

This tragedy is part of a pattern of gross incompetence by the District: Kemy was one of **four** children who died in a little over a year in apartments where the tenants had Permanent Supportive Housing vouchers….Three of them were beaten to death, Kemy starved. The city knows that [Permanent Supportive Housing] voucher recipients have addiction or mental health struggles and the voucher is supposed to be paired with regular social worker home visits. If these visits were happening as they should, these children might be alive today.

In a further comment, “Sibylline” added that the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) representing the neighborhood had passed a resolution urging action to ensure that families receiving Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) vouchers. I found the resolution, passed in March 2025 by ANC 3F. It confirmed “Sibylline”’s report that four children died between February 2023 and January 2025 in PSH voucher-funded apartments on Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. I in turn confirmed the ANC’s assertions by matching the information in the ANC resolution with media reports. I also obtained court documents in orderto provide the following details about the four deaths.

• Five-month-old Kenneth Geo Walton died in February, 2023, a week after he was rushed to the hospital from an apartment located at 4000 Massachusetts Avenue NW. According to court documents, Kenneth had been born premature and spent four months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU); he had been home for only about four weeks when he was killed. Kenneth and his parents had been living in the apartment of an acquaintance at 4000 Massachusetts Avenue since they brought Kenneth home from the hospital; they had previously been living in a car. The medical examiner ruled the cause of Kenneth’s death to be “complications of multiple blunt force injuries” and the manner of death to be homicide. In July, 2024, the police arrested Kenneth’s mother, Christen Borden, and charged her with first-degree murder. Borden is currently in court-ordered inpatient drug treatment. Her trial is scheduled for January 11, 2027.
• On September 28, 2024, police responding to a call found 18-month-old Journee Moore of Upper Marlboro Maryland suffering from cardiac arrest at Sedgwick Gardens, 3726 Connecticut Avenue Northwest. Journee was pronounced dead upon arrival at Children’s National Medical Center. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death to be complications of multiple blunt force injuries of the torso and the manner of death to be homicide. According to court documents, Journee’s father, Wayne Blake, lived in the apartment with his (Blake’s) mother, who was the leaseholder, and two other people. He was in a relationship with Journee’s mother, who often stayed at the apartment with Journee and and left her to be cared for by Blake or his mother. On May 8, 2025, Wayne Blake was charged with first degree murder and cruelty to children in Journee’s death. He is awaiting presentation of his case to a grand jury.
• On October 6, 2024 (barely a week since Journee’s death) police responded to 4500 Connecticut Avenue to find Deandre Pettus, Junior, age five, already dead inside a filthy apartment. Deandre lived in the apartment with his father, Deandre Pettus Sr., and two sisters. Pettus was arrested on the scene. The medical examiner found no apparent cause of death and ruled Deandre’s cause and manner of death to be “undetermined” pending further testing and consultation. But in July 2025, a grand jury returned an indictment charging Pettus with killing his son by drowning him. Pettus was arraigned on charges of first-degree felony murder on July 11, 2025. He is free pending his trial, which is scheduled for March 1, 2027.
• On January 18, 2025, police officers found the bodies of 38-year-old Ebony Washington and her 20-month-old daughter, Kemy, dead in their apartment at 5415 Connecticut Avenue NW. Ebony had overdosed on a mix of MDMA, cocaine, ethanol and the animal sedative xylazine. Kemy had died of starvation and dehydration. Mother and daughter had been dead for days or even weeks. The medical examiner ruled Kemy’s death to be an accident, but it was also a clear example of child neglect, like many accidents due to lack of supervision, unsafe living conditions, and driving under the influence of a substance.

The deaths of these four children occurred amid increasing concern among Ward 3 residents about the behavior of tenants with rent subsidies at a number of luxury Northwest apartment buildings around Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues, including the four where the children died. In the wake of the deaths of Journee Moore and Deandre Pettus in the space of one week, ANC 3F convened a special meeting in October 2024 to address these concerns. People living in the buildings in question testified about disturbing and even frightening behaviors by voucher tenants, ranging from playing loud music to threats against tenants who made complaints. One tenant reported witnessing numerous incidents of child abuse. Council Member Matt Frumin, along with residents and ANC Commissioners, expressed the concern that families in these units were not receiving the services they require in order to function independently, and that some may not even be able to function even with help.

In its resolution, ANC 3F reported that all four children died in Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) voucher-funded apartments. PSH provides two core services: a rental subsidy that pays that portion of the rent that exceeds 30 percent of the participant’s income and intensive case management services.¹ To qualify, recipients must have had a year or more of documented chronic homelessness, limited earnings potential, and the need for intensive case management. PSH programs can be tenant-based (the voucher is issued to the tenant, who can take it anywhere in the District), or unit-based, meaning that the voucher goes with the unit.

I could not confirm the ANC’s assertion that the leaseholders of all four apartments where the children died had PSH vouchers. Based on court documents obtained by the ANC, three of the leaseholders definitely had a voucher of some sort, and the fourth probably did as well.² However, as DHS representatives explained at a special meeting convened by ANC 3F, information about what type of voucher a tenant has in confidential. According to DHS, more than 20,000 people receive a rental subsidy through one of the city’s voucher programs. Most of them receive Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8) through the DC Housing Authority, which do not provide or require social services. Only about 6,600 of the 20,000 voucher holders in DC have DHS vouchers, which include PSH vouchers and also Targeted Affordable Housing (TAH) vouchers, which serve a population with less intensive needs. Therefore, we cannot be sure that any of the leaseholders of the four apartments where the children died had PSH vouchers, though the severe mental health and drug problems of at least two of them suggest that they did.³

According to DHS, PSH provides a minimum of two contacts a month with the case manager, including one face-to-face contact in the home.⁴ However, as I learned from the special meeting convened by ANC 3F, PSH voucher holders cannot be required to meet with their case managers. The DHS representatives who attended the ANC meeting stated that requiring services would violate the Housing First Model, which requires all services to be voluntary and is incorporated into the Homeless Services Reform Act (HSRA). I was not able to find a prohibition on requiring services in that legislation. But refusal to participate in case management is not among the few situations in which a provider is allowed to discontinue PSH for a client.

Even the answer to whether case managers attempted to make the required visits to known PSH clients is protected by privacy rights. Assuming that Ebony Washington had a PSH voucher, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for the last attempted and completed visits to her home—visits that could possibly have saved Kemy. But the information was denied based on the privacy concerns of the (deceased) mother and daughter. In the absence of this information, we don’t know if Ebony refused to engage in visits, or if the required visits were simply not offered. I then tried to get aggregate data on the number of attempted and completed home visits for each client, but my request was denied because it would require the agency to create a record it does not currently maintain. (One wonders how they can assess the program without such a record.) So we have no idea what proportion of PSH clients are getting their required two case management contacts per month.

So what can be done to ensure the safety of children in voucher-funded apartments? Based on their belief that the children killed were all in voucher-funded apartments, ANC 3F recommended that the District “fund and require weekly in-home case management visits to all PSH voucher tenants, prioritizing those with minor children in the household.” This would be a good start. Such a policy might have saved Kemy or Deandre, but it probably would not have helped Kenneth Geo Walton and Journee Moore, who were killed in apartments where they were not included on the lease and would not be known to DHS.

But bigger change is needed. The comments at the ANC meeting suggest that something is very wrong with the housing voucher programs that are placing people with many challenges in Northwest apartments where they are receiving few services or supports. The DHS representatives at the meeting explained that most PSH vouchers are tenant-based, which means that the subsidies are attached to the participants and not the apartments. In contrast, unit-based models can be “scattered site,” “limited site-based” or “site-based.” Site-based models have 100 percent of the units occupied by DHS clients. It is my opinion that all Permanent Supportive Housing should be site-based. That would allow social workers to be present onsite and provide the intensive services that are needed and also would allow the provision of adequate security in the buildings.

Even further changes are needed. The current model is self-contradictory. It does not make sense to say that Permanent Supportive Housing combines housing with social services, and then make the social services optional; without the social services, the program is no longer Permanent Supportive Housing. Accepting and cooperating with services should be required for PSH recipients and not doing so should be grounds for termination, with a required report to CFSA for families with children. Moreover, privacy requirements should be abridged for voucher recipients. All recipients of any type of voucher should be required to sign a form authorizing the release of information about the existence and type of their voucher in cases of a crime or egregious incident occurring in their unit. This is necessary for purposes of developing appropriate policies in response to unforeseen events. The DHS staff suggested at the ANC meeting that many complaints they receive are not about their PSH clients; we need to know who the troubled tenants are and make policy accordingly. Perhaps all voucher recipients need home visits, for example. Asking someone receiving a monthly subsidy as large as $3,000 to do something in return is eminently reasonable; it is likely that most DC residents would agree with such a requirement. Such a policy would be better for recipients, their children, and their neighbors than the current lack of services or supervision.

There is no evidence that any case manager attempted to see or reach Ebony Washington in the time before Kemy died. Perhaps repeated attempts to make contact could have resulted in police accessing the apartment earlier and saving Kemy. Or if Ebony had been receiving regular visits from a case manager, CFSA might have been contacted soon enough to save Kemy. Kemy’s paternal grandmother called the agency when she thought Ebony seemed out of it but got no result. Maybe the case manager, presumably a mandatory reporter, would have had a better result. We will never know. But we do know one thing. Leaving these troubled families with no services is not the answer to ending homelessness—and it puts their children at an unacceptable risk.

Originally published in Child Welfare Monitor DC