New York City

Man in Infamous Beating Death of NYC Toddler Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison

After a blistering Department of Investigation report on Jaden Jordan's death, ACS agreed to overhaul its Emergency Children's Services unit, which handles cases that arise outside of normal business hours

What to Know

  • Jaden Jordan, 3, was taken to a hospital unconscious on Nov. 28, 2016 after an apparent beating by his mother's boyfriend
  • He had a fractured skull and was on life support for nearly a week; the toddler died on Dec. 3, 2016; the case sparked ACS reforms
  • The boyfriend, Salvatore Lucchesse, was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years in prison; he had pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter

A Brooklyn man has been sentenced to 15 years in prison in the beating death of his girlfriend's 3-year-old son, a brutal killing that exposed grave inadequacies in the city's Administration for Children's Services and led to sweeping reform. 

Jaden Jordan was beaten into a coma by Salvatore Lucchesse, a 26-year-old man who was the boyfriend of Jordan's mother at the time the child died. The toddler spent nearly a week on a ventilator following the Nov. 28, 2016 attack. 

Lucchesse pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter last month. Investigators said Jordan's mother left the boy home alone with Lucchesse when she went to work that day. Jordan was with the boyfriend for about seven and a half hours, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and defecated on himself at some point during the day. It was at 4:30 p.m. that Lucchesse called 911 to report Jordan unconscious.

The boy was taken, soiled and unresponsive, to a hospital. Jordan had suffered a fractured skull and a lacerated spleen and liver by the time ACS workers got to his Gravesend home that Monday. He died a few days later, on Dec. 3, 2016, when he was removed from life support. 

"This was a senseless death of a helpless little boy who was left in the defendant’s care," Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in announcing the sentencing Tuesday. "There is no excuse ever, under any circumstances, for beating a child. Today’s sentence is a small measure of justice for Jaden and his devastated family."

The case exposed disturbing inadequacies in ACS' emergency unit, according to a blistering Department of Investigation report released about a month and a half after Jaden died. 

The DOI report ripped ACS for failing to get to the boy sooner, saying its investigation found that "the depth of errors over a two-day period was so significant, and the errors involved the overall implementation of policies so basic, that they go to the heart of ACS’s core mission of protecting children and implicate high-level, systemic problems." 

The DOI looked at hundreds of documents, interviews and computer forensics amid its probe into ACS' handling of Jordan's death, and its summary report on the matter indicated ACS workers did have access to databases that would have given them the right address for Jordan sooner. 

Specifically, the report blasted ACS's Emergency Children’s Services (“ECS”) unit, which handles cases during nights, weekends and holidays, as wholly inadequate in terms of staffing, case practice, supervision and training.

After Jordan's death, the ACS doubled the size of the emergency response team from 61 workers to 120 after concluding it was dangerously overburdened.

Contact Us