A solemn little boy who didn’t know his name, address or phone number was found wandering alone in Battery Park City’s Teardrop Park around 9:30 a.m. on Monday, July 25. He was neatly dressed in a white shirt, red shorts and black sandals. The Park Enforcement Patrol (P.E.P.) tried to find the child’s caregiver but no one claimed the child. P.E.P. officers then contacted the Battery Park City Authority and the N.Y.P.D. “ The First Precinct responded immediately,” said B.P.C.A. president Gayle Horwitz, recounting the incident at the Authority’s monthly Board of Directors meeting on Tuesday. “They took the child to the precinct to try to identify his family.”
Horwitz said that, “In coordination with the N.Y.P.D. and P.E.P., the Authority reached out to our network of building managers, the local moms’ group, Manhattan Youth and the Downtown Alliance in an effort to get the child’s picture in as many places as possible. The good news is that the child was identified within hours. The First Precinct was notified by another N.Y.P.D. precinct that they had brought a distressed woman to Bellevue. After they saw the alert about the abandoned child, they made contact with that woman and the mother spoke to the doctor at Bellevue and was able to figure out that indeed, the little boy was hers.”
The child, who is three years old and whose name is Trevon Frazier is currently in the custody of the Administration for Children’s Services. The N.Y.P.D and A.C.S. are interviewing family members in New Jersey to determine who should take charge of Trevon.
“I want to publicly thank everyone involved,” said Horwitz, “especially our dedicated P.E.P. officers and the N.Y.P.D. Michael Gubbins from the Albanese Organization offered to check his cameras near the park, Bob Townley got an email out to his network of people. Jeff Simmons of the Downtown Alliance sent an alert and Abby Ehrlich of our Parks Conservancy contacted her list of people. It was a true community effort.”
— Terese Loeb Kreuzer
