She was a lit­tle girl with a mid­dle name that sug­gest­ed a bright fu­ture filled with promise. Sad­ly, the op­po­site was true for McKen­zie Hope Rechia, the sev­en-year-old girl found stran­gled to death in the squalid Pa­lo Seco shack that was her home one week ago.

An au­top­sy done on Wednes­day con­firmed that McKen­zie’s killer used their hands around her throat, end­ing a life that, from all re­ports, was filled with suf­fer­ing.

The warn­ing signs that McKen­zie was in dan­ger were ap­par­ent long enough for an in­ter­ven­tion to take place that could have saved her life. She had been seen around the neigh­bour­hood un­kempt and ne­glect­ed. She had been in the care of a close rel­a­tive who had been walk­ing around threat­en­ing to kill her and then com­mit sui­cide.

Neigh­bours said they called the po­lice and made re­ports to state agen­cies. The Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty con­firmed get­ting re­ports and had start­ed act­ing on them, a spokesper­son said.

How­ev­er, at the time of her death, there were no in­di­ca­tions of in­ter­ven­tions by the au­thor­i­ties to res­cue a very dis­tressed lit­tle girl. Sure­ly, a wel­fare check at the filthy one-room shack where McKen­zie lived and died—a place un­fit for a child—where she slept on a mat­tress on the floor with­out even the com­fort of a sheet, would have trig­gered ur­gent ac­tion.

In­stead, there is the heart-rend­ing, trag­ic re­al­i­ty that this case is not an iso­lat­ed in­ci­dent. T&T has been down this road too many times be­fore.

McKen­zie’s sto­ry bears sim­i­lar­i­ties to that of an­oth­er mur­dered lit­tle girl, Amy An­na­muntho­do, pro­nounced dead in hos­pi­tal on May 16, 2006. She was just four years old and had been beat­en, burned with cig­a­rettes, raped and sodomised, in ad­di­tion to be­ing locked in a room with a cloth stuffed in her mouth to muf­fle her cries.

In the 16 years be­tween the mur­ders of Amy and McKen­zie, there have been many oth­er tragedies in­volv­ing chil­dren. Pre­dictably, each in­ci­dent is fol­lowed by a pub­lic out­cry, much hand­wring­ing, ex­pres­sions of re­gret and promis­es of ac­tion.

But the promis­es to im­prove the sys­tem have not been kept and chil­dren are still dy­ing.

McKen­zie’s mur­der is just the lat­est hor­ren­dous ex­am­ple of the ex­tent to which T&T’s se­cu­ri­ty and so­cial wel­fare sys­tems con­sis­tent­ly fail the youngest and most vul­ner­a­ble of our cit­i­zens. The lat­est avail­able sta­tis­tics from the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty show that be­tween May 18, 2015, and Feb­ru­ary 28, 2021, 27,437 cas­es of in­ci­dents against chil­dren were re­port­ed.

This coun­try is still pro­cess­ing the hor­rors at chil­dren’s homes ex­posed in re­ports made pub­lic 25 years apart, the re­port of the Jus­tice Ju­dith Jones Task Force and the Robert Sab­ga re­port.

Yet, in the face of all these fright­en­ing facts, it is still the case that too lit­tle is done too late to pro­tect young in­no­cent lives. The au­thor­i­ties must act with greater ur­gency in re­spond­ing to cas­es of chil­dren in dis­tress.

It is time for bu­reau­cra­cy to be re­placed with ac­tions that bring mea­sur­able re­sults and for the re­quired num­ber of qual­i­fied pro­fes­sion­als to be re­cruit­ed to fill key po­si­tions through­out the child pro­tec­tion sys­tem.

It is too late for McKen­zie. Do not let it be too late for an­oth­er suf­fer­ing and ne­glect­ed child.