Little Jor’Dynn Duncan should never have gone to live with Emily Kelly, the Long Island woman who allegedly tortured the 7-year-old girl to death.
Kelly, along with her mother and her adult daughter, all deserve to be jailed for life after they tied up Jor’Dynn in a bathtub and left 90 injuries on her body before the child ultimately suffered cardiac arrest in December.
It was a house of horrors — and Suffolk County Child Protective Services placed her there.
Of all the foster homes in New York, why did child welfare officials and family court judges think Kelly’s was appropriate?
Because even though she was not Jor’Dynn’s blood relative, Kelly was deemed “kin” under CPS rules.
Jor’Dynn’s mother lost custody of the child a few years ago, and her father is serving up to four years at Sing Sing for burglary.
Kelly is the father’s fiancée, so CPS placed Jor’Dynn in her home in December 2024.
A month later, CPS was already investigating maltreatment there — yet a judge granted Kelly full custody in April 2025.
When Jor’Dynn missed approximately 40 days of school that year, Kelly made up a string of excuses to hide the abuse, prosecutors say.
There were other red flags: Kelly’s one-year-old son reportedly also died in 1997 as a result of abuse. Her boyfriend was sentenced to 23 years in prison for the killing.
And she had a baby daughter who died in 1994 under cloudy circumstances.
Only willful ignorance can explain why multiple officials thought Emily Kelly’s home would be a good placement for Jor’Dynn.
Why didn’t they protect this child?
One reason is that child welfare agencies’ first priority is placing children with “kin,” a preference that activists, academics and state and federal officials of both parties have all reinforced.
Intuitively, of course, it makes sense to place a child with an aunt or a grandmother if parents can’t care for them.
But the dysfunction present in a nuclear family is often present in the extended family as well.
Addiction, mental illness, domestic violence and child maltreatment are commonly intergenerational problems.
So the left’s desire to keep kids with people who share their skin color, combined with the right’s interest in saving money and limiting government’s reach, have created the perfect storm.
The Biden administration told states they could create looser standards for licensing kin foster families — and the Trump administration reiterated this in a recent “Dear Colleague” memo.
Both claim they want to eliminate bureaucratic hurdles that prevent family members from caring for children whose parents cannot.
But if they’re unnecessary hurdles, they can be eliminated for relatives and nonrelatives alike.
The truth is that agencies already have plenty of incentive to place children with extended family, or even “fictive kin” — anyone who knows the child.
Relatives are generally paid less, if they’re paid at all.
And caseworkers know they’d be in for far more blame if anything goes wrong in a placement with a non-relative foster family.
But there are serious reasons for concern when placing a child with extended family.
A report this spring from Oregon found that the state’s rate of abuse of children in foster care had reached an all-time high — after a three-year stretch, between 2022 and 2025, when the percentage of kids placed with relatives almost doubled, from 18.8% to 36.1%.
An analysis of child-abuse fatalities in Minnesota from 2014 to 2022 found that six of the seven deaths in foster care occurred in kinship homes.
Advocates for more kinship care — New Jersey stopped recruiting nonrelative foster parents entirely a few years ago, claiming that kin would be able to handle 100% of the demand for foster homes — say they’re not sacrificing safety.
But Illinois recently loosened its rules about background checks for kin placements: Authorities are clearly willing to look the other way.
As the Kelly case moves into criminal court, the temptation will be to focus only on the women who committed these terrible acts.
But it would be a grave mistake to ignore the systems that failed Jor’Dynn.
Weirdly, Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine made a point of saying that “CPS is not to blame for Jor’Dynn’s placement with Kelly,” because it was “done by a judge.”
But CPS officials, not judges, make foster care recommendations; judges confirm their choices.
Neither acts alone.
It’s too late for us to save Jor’Dynn from the unimaginable torture she endured.
But to honor her memory, we must keep it from happening again.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
