A three-year-old girl who died of neglect in a squalid apartment was “skin and bones”, had rotten black teeth and a lice infestation, authorities said.
Joycelynn Ann Dylewski died in hospital on February 19, 2025 after her parents called an ambulance to their home in Upstate New York saying she was struggling to breath.
Matthew Dylewski, 34, and Samantha Dylewski, 33, were arrested and subsequently charged with criminally negligent homicide.
They pleaded guilty and were handed the maximum sentence of 16 months to four years in prison Monday. They were also ordered to have no further contact with their four surviving children, all aged under 17, until June 2038.
Her death has led to calls for stiffer sentences, with New York State Sen. Jim Tedisco and among those proposing Joycelynn's Law, to change criminally negligent homicide from a Class E felony to a Class A and increase the maximum sentence to 20 years.
“This was, over a sustained period of time, continuous neglect of a child,” Tedisco told reporters. “The child’s teeth were blackened, they were all decayed. Lice all over the child’s body, skin and bones, no nutrition.
“They even gave this child an illicit drug, Clonidine, to put the child to sleep so they wouldn’t hear, I suspect, this little three year old bab’s cries of fear, anguish and pain.”
At their sentencing, Saratoga County Judge James R Davis told the defendants the pre-sentence report on the circumstances of their daughter’s death was “the most horrific he has ever read,” according to The Times Union.
“Your daughter suffered over a long period of time,” Davis said, per The Times. “Even the other children could see that she suffered because of your neglect.
“It’s a gift to have a child. You had several children, and all of them suffered at your hands.”
Saratoga County First Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Buckley told the court Samatha Dylewski had attempted to blame her children for Jocelyn’s plight, complaining that the girl herself had “fought her too much when she tried to apply treatment” to the lice scabs on her scalp.
According to The Times, Buckley stressed the unsanitary conditions in which the family had been living, saying the property was infested with flies, rotting food lay on surface tops, the kitchen sink was clogged, the furnishings were stained and that investigators’ boots had stuck to the floor upon entry.
Dan Shippee, owner of Phoenix Property Maintenance, the company ultimately called in to clean up the apartment by its landlord, has since told CBS News’s local affiliate he was shocked by the extent of the filth he encountered.
“I’ve never really been in too many places where I had to shovel so much trash off the floor,” he said. “There were dead flies and bugs all over that apartment.”
Prior to her sentencing, Samantha Dylewski read a statement saying she “doesn’t know how it got this far” and insisting that she loved her children.
“As their mother, it’s my duty to protect them from harm, and I failed,” she told the judge. “I don’t want sympathy. I do not want forgiveness. I don’t deserve any of that. The only thing I’ll ever want is my baby girl.”
