Months before a Newark woman allegedly beat her 6-year-old daughter to death in March, concerned tipsters called the state’s child abuse hotline three times, accusing the woman of harming the girl and her three younger siblings.
In each instance, the agency took no action and deemed the complaints unfounded — including after a worker from the state Division of Child Protection and Permanency visited the child at school just three days before she died, according to the agency’s first report on the case. The report, which has not been previously disclosed to the public, was obtained by NJ Advance Media last week.
These were missed opportunities to intervene before tragedy struck, state Children and Families Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer told NJ Advance Media in her first public statements about Ne’Miya Duncan’s violent death on March 10. The child’s mother, Zyrihah Hall, 26, was indicted on murder and child endangerment charges in June.
“The decisions that were made in the investigation and then the subsequent follow-up goes against our policy and practice,” Norbut Beyer said, calling the actions “shocking and upsetting.”
Deeming the allegations unfounded was “just wrong,” the commissioner said.
The fallout from the months-long internal investigation into how the child welfare agency handled the case has been dramatic. The state filed disciplinary charges against eight employees and transferred the manager to the main office in Trenton. (That manager has since retired.)
In April, Norbut Beyer ordered a statewide look at all active cases that have had at least three calls to the hotline in less than a year and dispatched staff to visit 1,400 families to verify workers made proper decisions to protect the children’s safety.
The agency found a problem with decision-making in 42 cases, or 3% of the 1,400 families, the commissioner said. Confidentiality laws prevent the agency from discussing specific cases unless they involve a child abuse death or a near-fatalty injury, department spokesman Jason Butkowski said. But, he added: the 42 cases with questionable findings “did not result in adverse outcomes.”
Most visibly, Norbut Beyer closed the division’s Newark South office Oct. 30, and transferred its 87 employees to other offices, with most working from the remaining two division offices in Newark, East Orange and other offices in Essex County.
In a statement through her spokesman in October and in comments at a public meeting last week, she said she had been planning for about a year to close the Newark South office because of declining call and case volumes.
But in the interview with NJ Advance Media this week, she acknowledged the Duncan case helped confirm her decision and accelerated the timetable for closure.
“It made sense that it was Newark South because of them not having a manager, and because they had started out as the smallest office and we had started to move staff. And then after the child death, we ended up doing a deep review, looking at the Duncan case,” she said.
Yet even as Norbut Beyer pledges reform, questions persist about the handling of the investigation and communication with the victim’s family.
Some DCCP employees have also sharply criticized Norbut Beyer’s oversight, suggesting she’s used the case to advance her own leadership agenda.
Alexus Duncan of Newark, Ne’Miya’s paternal aunt and former foster parent, said she and her brother and the child’s father, Vymeer Duncan, had not been informed of the agency’s findings.
She said they have been trying to get information about the case since March and found out on her own that a caseworker had visited her niece at school three days before she died.
A school employee called out of concern about the child’s safety, she said.
“That’s news to me,” Duncan said of the report’s findings. “We, the family, feel like everyone forgot too soon and there was not any justice served.”
Ne’Miya was a funny, energetic child who loved to dance, take photos and be photographed, her aunt said.
“She could light up a room. I know a lot of people say that, but she really could change the energy in a room.”
“She is very missed,” Alexus Duncan said. “We fought for her.”
A long family history
Zyrihah Hall’s history with the child welfare system began in 2020, according to the Comprehensive Child Abuse and Prevention Act report, which the agency is obligated to compile after a child dies from maltreatment.
Three anonymous callers to the hotline alleged the mother had physically abused Ne’Miya in 2020 and 2021 but investigators deemed two complaints “unfounded” and the other “not established,” meaning the investigator could not determine who had harmed the child.
In April 2023, a caseworker sent to the home found Ne’Miya with a black eye and a “knot” on her forehead, the report said. The worker also found scratches on the backs of her siblings, ages 2 and 1. The state substantiated the abuse complaint against Hall and placed the children with relatives, according to the report.
By May 2024, a judge ordered Hall’s children be returned to her custody after she participated in therapy and parenting and anger management classes, according to the report. The division continued to supervise the family.
In August 2024, a caller reported Hall was still abusing her kids. A caseworker who visited the family found Ne’Miya with a swollen lip — an injury she suffered when she and her siblings intervened as their mother’s partner attacked her. The agency deemed the complaint against the mother unfounded and took no action.
In October, a caseworker investigated a complaint Hall had spanked her son with a shoe or slipper. In February 2025, a school employee reported the family because the boy had bruises and scratches on his face. Workers also declared the complaints unfounded.
The last time a caseworker made contact with the children was on March 7, when the worker came to their school, according to the report.
The employees involved should have taken some action, given the family’s extensive child welfare history, Norbut Beyer said.
“There’s a chain of command that’s meant to be in place so that these things don’t happen… That chain didn’t help in this case,” she said. “When it fails, it’s really heartbreaking and tragic because we do have systems in place to keep these failures from happening.”
The experience with the case prompted Norbut Beyer to convene a committee of national child protection experts to discuss ways to improve child abuse and neglect investigations. A new policy that will go into effect in January will require the agency “flag” and investigate any “frequently encountered families” with at least three complaints called into the hotline over 12 months, she said.
State oversight continues
Ne’Miya Duncan’s death is the first major public controversy for the Department of Children and Families since it emerged from 20 years of oversight by a federal judge in 2023.
The oversight began in 2003, when Gov. Jim McGreevey settled a class-action lawsuit with a national children’s advocacy organization that had accused the state of running one of the most mismanaged and cash-starved child welfare systems in the nation.
It took two decades, but the court and the plaintiffs agreed that after spending billions of dollars to modernize the agency and maintaining a long list of improvements, New Jersey had vastly improved its ability to protect children and assist families in crisis.
Now the division’s work is overseen by the Staffing and Oversight Review Subcommittee to the New Jersey Task Force on Child Abuse and Neglect. Under state law, the subcommittee monitors the agency’s performance with a focus on employee caseloads.
Norbut Beyer closed the Newark South office without informing the panel, Lisa Chapland, the subcommittee co-chairwoman, said.
“Certainly it is important for us to know they are reallocating staff,” said Chapland, an attorney and employee with the New Jersey State Bar Association. “I will give a little grace, as we are still feeling our way” on how the panel and the division will work together, she said.
At the subcommittee’s request, Norbut Beyer discussed the office closure at a Dec. 9 meeting, explaining that they had stopped backfilling vacant jobs over the last year because caseloads were unusually low.
The agency has worked to minimize the impact on families, by providing transportation to the new location, the commissioner said.
Permanency workers, who monitor children who are at home or are expected to return to their parents from foster care, “were averaging three and four cases” a month, far below the goal of no more than 12, the commissioner said. “That was happening in other Essex County offices as well and other places across the state, but specifically with regard to Newark.”
There was no discussion at the Dec. 9 meeting about the findings of the internal investigation involving the Duncan family and its influence on the decision to close the office.
Upon reviewing the Duncan case report at NJ Advance Media’s request, Chapland said, “My disappointment with what is contained in this report cannot be overstated,” noting that the subcommittee had raised issues about what the department terms “frequently encountered families.”
Two DCPP employees with direct knowledge of the Duncan case who requested anonymity because they feared losing their jobs, said Norbut Beyer was determined to close the office and replace senior staff. She is using this case as pretext, they said.
Some of targeted employees were “interrogated” without their union representatives present and have dragged out the disciplinary proceedings in violation of contract rules, the employees said.
Butkowski, the department spokesman, said: “DCF adheres to all fair labor practices and honors workers’ right to be represented, when requested.”
As for the criticism about the decision to close the Newark South office, he said, “We’ve been transparent that the decision to restructure the local offices began a year prior to the outcome in the Hall case.”
Norbut Beyer and her office have declined to comment on anything involving the pending disciplinary cases.
The agency has never closed an office as a result of mistakes in a child abuse investigation, the employees said.
East Orange had to expand its coverage area, adding 150 streets in Newark that were handled by the now-shuttered office, one employee said. About a dozen workers from Newark were assigned there, but employees are feeling “very overwhelmed,” another employee said.
“It makes no friggin’ sense to close an office which has seen the largest concentration of cases in the state,” one of the affected workers said.
NJ Advance Media asked but did not receive caseload data for the three Newark offices, which are housed in one building on Halsey Street.
Data on the department’s website, however, suggested intake worker caseloads in the Newark South office exceeded limits every month from April through August 2025.
NJ Advance Media staff writer Rebecca Everett contributed t o this report.
