Mom’s “Catch” of a New Man Beats Her Son to Death

Mom’s “Catch” of a New Man Beats Her Son to Death

Zymir “Zai Zai” Perkins was born on June 21st, 2010, the same month that his mother, Geraldine Perkins, graduated from high school. From the moment Zymir was born, his mother was already on ACS’s (Administration for Children’s Services) radar. Geraldine tested positive for cannabis use while still in the hospital; however, baby Zymir did not. Still, the hospital reported the new mother to ACS for review. Ultimately, the agency closed the case. This would not be the last time that ACS would receive a report regarding Geraldine and her infant son.

The young mother was raised by her grandmother and was staying with her at the time Zymir was born. Around this time, the grandmother accused her granddaughter of sleeping with her husband, which quickly landed her and her infant son out on the streets. Additionally, this is when Geraldine began beating her son.

Geraldine and Zymir bounced between homeless shelters in the greater New York City area. In order to earn enough money to feed the two of them, the young mother resorted to selling her body on the streets. While staying in one of the city’s shelters, Geraldine was required to take parenting classes, but they clearly were not helping. At one particular shelter, a counselor intervened while Geraldine was beating Zymir. They threatened to file a report if they witnessed that type of behavior ever again, and no further action was taken. But this did not stop Geraldine at all.

When Zymir was three years old, the mother—and I use that word loosely—would yell at the little boy and beat him with a belt. She justified using the belt to punish her son due to her lupus diagnosis. Apparently, beating her son with her hands was painful for her, and she didn’t want to hurt herself. She’d been hospitalized due to the disease many times in the past, and based on pictures, her hands looked pretty bad off. For those unaware, lupus is an autoimmune disease; inflammation caused by lupus can affect many different body systems, including your joints. It is a lifelong disease and can be fatal if not treated properly.

Enter Rasheem Smith

In May of 2015, the now 26-year-old Geraldine met 42-year-old Rasheem Smith while on her way back to Hamilton Place, one of the many battered women’s shelters where she’d been staying with Zymir. Even though he was twice her age, the single mother found him to be handsome. He was described as well-built, muscular, and college-educated, so when he asked for her number, she was quick to give it to him.

At first, Rasheem seemed to be Geraldine’s knight in shining armor. Rasheem brought the mother flowers and gifts and took her out to dinner. This was something that Geraldine hadn’t ever experienced before. He promised to take good care of Zymir, and at first, it seemed like he was going to be an awesome father figure. Rasheem played with the little boy, bought him toys, cut his hair, and read to him from the Bible.

According to Geraldine, it was magical: “He was like my Prince Charming. I never experienced a man bring me flowers like he did. Every day he’d pick me up and take me to the park. We’d go to restaurants together. He was good to my child.”

In the beginning, things moved quickly, and Rasheem asked Geraldine to take things to the next level. The 42-year-old invited the mother and her son to move in with him at his apartment located at 606 West 135th Street in Harlem. Now, you’d think this would be a dream come true for a mother and son that were bouncing from shelter to shelter, right? I think at this point we all know better; this isn’t that type of show.

The House of Horrors

In June of 2015, Geraldine and Zymir moved into Rasheem’s apartment. Now, when I say apartment, what I really mean is a squat. This handsome older gentleman who had been taking such good care of Geraldine and her son was living in a derelict apartment illegally. The unit had no electricity whatsoever, aside from what Rasheem had been funneling via an extension cord from a neighbor’s apartment through adjoining windows.

But this apartment was bad. The refrigerator was full of decaying food, and the white gas stove was caked in layers upon layers of grime. The dining room table held countless prescription bottles amid a clutter of trash and other debris. The two bedrooms fared no better; each was filled with piles of trash, dirty clothes, dirty dishes, old food, and broken furniture. The bare mattresses were filthy and filled with the same grime found all over the rest of the apartment.

The living room was just as horrendous. The carpet was embedded with feces along with live maggots. The room housed a white bucket filled with a brown mystery liquid. Instead of curtains, the windows were adorned with dirty blankets and towels. The bathroom was absolutely disgusting, with a scum-filled sink and a bathtub full of mildew and dark black filth. The entire apartment, and probably the entire building, had a severe cockroach infestation.

Not only were they trapped in a prison of squalor, but soon after the mother and son moved in, Rasheem totally flipped a switch. Geraldine’s dream come true quickly became Zymir’s worst nightmare.

The Abuse Escalates

The man who was supposed to look after her son would take his anger out on the boy for even the most minor of infractions and would beat him severely, subjecting him to forms of torture underneath the guise of punishment. One of Rasheem’s favorite punishments was to force Zymir, now five years old, to stand in the filthy bathtub and take freezing cold showers. Geraldine claimed that in a short time, her new boyfriend began to frighten her, but according to her, she did not know how to leave.

• June 2015: An anonymous Good Samaritan filed a complaint with ACS after they witnessed Rasheem attacking Zymir in a public park. According to the source, the five-year-old was hit with excessive force at least 20 times on the bottom and legs for not listening at a picnic. His mother was present for the beating and did not intervene. Allegedly, Rasheem was beating Zymir so hard that the slaps were audible from a distance.

• June 30th, 2015: ACS was involved once again after Rasheem caught Zymir drawing on the wall of a friend’s apartment with a crayon. As punishment, Rasheem beat the little boy with his belt. His screams were so loud they were heard on the sidewalk. Zymir told investigators from ACS that on numerous occasions his mother’s boyfriend beat him with a belt and made him take cold showers as a punishment. ACS offered Geraldine parental services, which she refused. No further action was taken.

• July 4th, 2015: Rasheem, Geraldine, and Zymir attended a family barbecue. After the little boy pulled up a hundred dollars’ worth of plants from a relative’s garden, which Rasheem had to replace, Zymir was deprived of food. Apparently, this was a common punishment in the house. When they got home, Rasheem forced Zymir to hold a plank position for an extended period of time, and when the little boy’s arms ultimately collapsed, he was beaten with a stick, as well as punched and kicked. But Rasheem couldn’t let the situation with the plants go, so as further punishment, Zymir was forced to stand in a corner overnight with Geraldine supervising him so that he could not fall asleep.

• August 28th, 2015: Geraldine and Rasheem went out to dinner, leaving Zymir to wander the streets alone, after which a neighbor found him and called the police, thankfully. But three days later, the couple got into a physical fight with the neighbor in front of Zymir. Geraldine admitted that Rasheem punished Zymir with cold showers, and Zymir again complained that Rasheem had been beating him with a belt. Despite a caseworker noticing troubling injuries on Zymir, including missing teeth, ACS found inadequate guardianship but did nothing as a result.

Failed by the System

In October of 2015, Zymir, now a kindergartener, got in trouble at school for asking to see another little boy’s private parts. Thinking that this was some sort of sign that the five-year-old liked boys, Rasheem punched him in the jaw, which caused him to lose a tooth.

Zymir attended P.S. 192 Jacob H. Schiff school, which was located just a block away from his apartment. Due to his injuries and the ongoing beatings inflicted upon him, Zymir missed 36 days of school between September and November of 2015. According to his teacher, Josefina Gutierrez, he was academically behind; he wasn’t able to write his name, and he did not know the alphabet. She said Zymir frequently showed up at school with injuries, including a swollen jaw and a bruise on his eye, and he walked with a limp. She reported the incidents, and the school contacted ACS.

Zymir had minor behavioral problems, including once throwing a pencil at another student, and Gutierrez reported his behavior to his mom at dismissal. Each time, she noticed that Zymir would not return to school for days, and when he finally did, he had bruises all over him. One time she mentioned her concerns to Rasheem, who suggested that the teacher mention his name to get the little boy in line. When she followed his suggestion, a look of terror in Zymir’s eyes made her never want to call the home again. She claimed that she stopped calling the little boy’s home to report misbehavior because she was afraid if she did, it would lead to Zymir getting beat.

According to Geraldine, Zymir would plead with her to leave Rasheem. He begged, “Mommy, I wanna go home.” However, Geraldine ignored her son’s pleas because she was in love with Rasheem. In some way, she thought he must be right. Zymir was regularly forced to skip meals, take cold showers, hold a plank position for a prolonged period of time, and stand upright all night without sleep. Geraldine did nothing to stop the mistreatment of her son because she admired Rasheem’s grown kids from Boston who seemed to be successful. She thought the harsh discipline and beatings would make a good man out of her little boy. She, too, participated in the beatings, using a belt or a broomstick to hit Zymir so it would not hurt her hands.

Due to the stress from the beatings and the unsanitary living environment, Zymir frequently soiled his pants and would urinate and defecate on the floor. This would send Rasheem into a rage, and the beatings would continue in a vicious cycle.

On February 2nd, 2016, Zymir’s school reported suspicious injuries over four months, including a possible broken jaw, scratches near his eye, and a knocked-out tooth. Geraldine blamed each injury on a fall, and per usual, ACS failed to investigate.

On April 18th, 2016, school staff again reported suspicious bruises and scratches on both of Zymir’s legs after the little boy showed up to school limping. Elizabeth Garcia, the school nurse, noted that Zymir’s thighs were covered in oval-shaped bruises—the kind that you would get if you were hit with a belt. School administrators escorted Zymir and his mother to the Manhattan Child Advocacy Center, where the little boy was interviewed on camera and explained exactly what happened to him. ACS and the NYPD’s Instant Response Team investigated and claimed that Zymir was not in any immediate danger of physical harm. ACS investigated a total of five times, and even though they determined some of the complaints to be valid, they still allowed Zymir to stay in his mother’s care.

The Final Tragedy

Months passed after this. Zymir’s sixth birthday came and went, and it was surely not a happy one. Summer arrived, and the beatings continued inside Rasheem’s dark, roach-infested apartment. This apartment hadn’t had proper electricity in over a year, and temperatures in the city sweltered into the high 90s. Without air conditioning, the apartment must have smelled even more horrendous. And after Zymir’s kindergarten year, he never returned to school.

On September 24th, 2016, Zymir was in trouble for something insignificant. As punishment, food and water were withheld from the little boy. Zymir hadn’t eaten or drank in 24 hours; meanwhile, Rasheem and Geraldine feasted on Chinese takeout in front of him. He was made to go to sleep alone and hungry on the filthy living room floor. Later that evening, Geraldine claimed to have woken up to the sound of something rustling through the garbage. Thinking that it was a mouse, she got up, only to find Zymir picking through the trash, eating whatever food that he could find. After taking the bag away from him, the mother went back to bed.

The following morning, Geraldine awoke to Rasheem screaming at Zymir, who was standing in the living room wearing only a t-shirt and underwear, both of which were smeared in feces. The little boy had defecated on the floor and was trying to hide it. Apparently, Zymir was too afraid to walk in the dark by himself to the bathroom. This enraged Rasheem, who cursed Zymir and jabbed him in the stomach with a broken broomstick. He followed up by beating him from his chest down to his legs, at one point holding him in the air while striking him.

Geraldine did nothing—absolutely nothing—to stop this attack. She thought her son was wrong for making a mess on the floor and deserved his punishment. At first, Zymir lay shaking and silent while he endured the vicious beating, but soon he was forced into the bathroom, screaming. Rasheem forced the little boy under the shower head and turned on the freezing cold water, after which he pulled down the shower curtain rod and began beating him over the head with it. Zymir went limp and silent. At first, Geraldine thought that her son was pretending to be unconscious because, according to her, he’d done so in the past so Rasheem would stop beating him.

Rasheem finished off his attack by hanging the unconscious six-year-old on the back of the bathroom door by a hook. He was soaked and covered in blood and feces. When Geraldine attempted to take him down, Rasheem threw his lifeless body into one of the bedrooms, where he fell in the crack between the wall and the bed. Geraldine noted that he looked dead. Well, Geraldine, that’s because he was.

The Cover-Up and Arrest

Rasheem did what any psychopath would do: he left to get breakfast sandwiches for the couple. Geraldine wasn’t much better. In the time that her boyfriend was gone, she claimed to have cleaned up the house, first starting with the living room, then moving on to the bedroom where the body of her six-year-old lay in squalor. She claimed to have tried to revive Zymir with a bath and CPR but eventually retreated to reading her Bible. She knew in her heart that her son was dead, and she was just worried about how she could get out of trouble.

When Rasheem finally arrived home, they made plans to dispose of Zymir’s body. He told Geraldine to take the boy down the back door, and if anyone asked where she had come from, to lie. He didn’t want anyone knowing about his illegal squat. He told her to bring Zymir to the hospital and to claim that he had come down with food poisoning after eating at a homeless shelter.

But Geraldine didn’t leave immediately. In fact, the timeline of events gets pretty fishy, as you’ll soon see. She took some time to put on some makeup and a wig. She claimed that she was very self-conscious and needed to look her best when leaving the house. Finally, she carried the body of her dead son out the back door, where a bystander helped her hail a cab to Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital. There’s actual surveillance footage that’s readily available on the internet that shows Geraldine carrying him inside.

Upon arrival, Geraldine told staff that he had fallen out of his bed. According to the staff, Zymir’s body was so cold that you could feel the coldness through his clothing, leading them to believe that he hadn’t just passed away—that he could have been dead for almost 17 hours. Doctors that examined Zymir’s battered and broken body likened his injuries to someone that had been hit by a car.

According to New York Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Susan Ely, Zymir endured months of merciless attacks that left him undersized, covered in injuries, and suffering from numerous broken ribs. He had multiple bruises, scrapes, and lacerations on the outside of his body. The injuries ranged from his head, face, torso, arms, and legs. She also observed a finger-mark bruise pattern around Zymir’s neck. His internal injuries were equally extensive, including more than 30 rib fractures. Dr. Ely said that he died from fatal Child Abuse Syndrome, which she described as a culmination of months of neglect and abuse with the final event being the tipping point. His manner of death was ruled a homicide.

Dr. Ely said the most striking observation she made was that he was a very thin little boy, weighing just 35 pounds and standing three feet six inches tall—the average size of a four-year-old boy. His stomach contents only contained bile. When Geraldine was questioned about his malnourishment, she claimed that her son was just like her and his biological father: just genetically thin. When asked about her son’s injuries, she claimed that the bruises were caused by playing, and she claimed to know nothing of her son’s 30 rib fractures that were in different stages of healing. When pressed further, she claimed that her son had never been struck other than spanks. This was, of course, a lie, as Zymir had been beaten with closed fists, feet, a shower curtain rod, a broken broom handle, and grabbed by the throat on many occasions.

Soon, both Geraldine Perkins and Rasheem Smith were arrested in connection with Zymir’s death.

Aftermath and Sentencing

After his death, neighbors lit candles and left them on a sidewalk in Harlem, recalling a little boy who often sat on a nearby stoop eating ice cream. According to city councilman Mark Levine, the community felt a sense of betrayal. Even when neighbors and school personnel did the right thing—they made these reports—they were not heeded. In addition, two caseworkers lost their jobs, and several others in the ACS were disciplined.

Three months later, the city’s child welfare commissioner, Gladys Carrión, stepped down over long-running concerns about the agency’s supervision of vulnerable kids. “Losing a child is unbearable, and it’s my responsibility and one that I take seriously.” Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said the city missed clear warning signs in Zymir’s case, appointed a new commissioner, David Hansell, who ordered a review of ACS. Since then, the agency has taken steps to make investigations more timely and improve preventative services for parents like Geraldine. David Hansell has also created new lines of communication between caseworkers and school officials and has started using attendance records to spot abuse in young children. School nurses have been trained to photograph injuries. The management of cases has also been tightened at child advocacy centers, like the one where Zymir was interviewed five months before he was murdered.

Zymir’s funeral was held on Friday, October 7th, 2016, at the Church of the Open Door in Brooklyn, New York. The little boy was laid to rest in a white suit and bow tie in a gold-trimmed, satin-lined white casket. A white veil was draped over the upper opening, and a white teddy bear holding a red heart was propped up by his head. In a eulogy Friday night, Reverend Mark V.C. Taylor urged hundreds of mourners packed in the pews to remember Zymir as a little boy who loved Spider-Man and the Ninja Turtles, with a smile that would captivate anyone’s heart. The NYPD detectives that were touched by Zymir’s case managed to raise $9,000 to pay for his funeral and for his wake. He was later buried in the children’s section of the Rosedale and Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey.

For a time, Zymir did not have a proper headstone. That was until Lane, who runs the blog and podcast Suffer the Little Children, decided to take matters into her own hands. She had been trying unsuccessfully for months to obtain the necessary permission to have one placed. So, on the fifth anniversary of his death, she visited the cemetery and placed a small memorial stone and a superhero flag at Zymir’s final resting place. If you haven’t checked out Lane’s work, I strongly urge you to do so; she’s a true advocate for kids who no longer have a voice.

Rasheem’s trial began in December of 2019 and lasted for four weeks. As part of her plea bargain, Geraldine spent several consecutive days on the witness stand providing testimony against her former boyfriend. On Wednesday, January 20th, 2020, Rasheem Smith was found guilty of second-degree homicide, first and second-degree manslaughter, and two counts of endangering the welfare of a minor. He was later sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

On Monday, May 17th, 2021, Geraldine pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter. This normally holds a sentence of two to six years in prison; however, Geraldine’s three years of time served waiting for her trial were taken into account. Also, while being held on Rikers Island, Geraldine claimed that her corrections officers set her up for a violent sexual assault by a terrifying inmate named Alexandria James.

On September 17th, 2020, Geraldine Perkins was paroled from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. She essentially served no time at all whatsoever for the death of her beautiful six-year-old son. Geraldine was born on August 28th, 1990. This would make her 32 years old as of the date of this recording. Let’s just hope that she doesn’t have any more kids while she’s still able to, because if this episode is any evidence at all, she clearly does not deserve them.