Two Freeport parents are facing up to 25 years in prison after a Nassau County grand jury handed down a first-degree assault indictment against them for allegedly starving and beating their three-year-old daughter across multiple months.
Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly announced the charges against Hanchelove Decius and Evenson Francois after their arraignment Monday, April 13. Both entered not guilty pleas. Their next court date is April 24.
Let’s be clear about what prosecutors say happened here. It didn’t start on June 8, 2025. According to Donnelly, the alleged abuse stretched back to October 2024, meaning this child spent roughly eight months in conditions that should never exist in any home, let alone one where two adults were supposed to be protecting her.
The case cracked open when the girl was scalded by a burning hot liquid while in Decius’s care on June 8. Third-degree burns. Chest and lower body. She was rushed to a hospital, and that’s where the full scope of what she’d allegedly endured came into view.
Doctors didn’t just treat burns. They found scarring lesions, lacerations, and bruises spread across her body, wounds consistent with inflicted injuries at different stages of healing. Scarring marked her forehead, nose, and face. An open laceration ran along her right eyebrow and another along her chin. She was severely malnourished, visibly emaciated. A three-year-old girl, systematically starved by the people who were supposed to feed her.
That detail about the wounds being in various stages of healing is the one prosecutors will lean on hard. It’s not a single terrible moment. The injuries told a timeline, and that timeline pointed back months, well before the June hospital visit, with none of it ever receiving medical attention until emergency room staff intervened.
Francois was picked up by Nassau County Police on Friday, April 10. Decius was taken into custody three days later on April 13, the same day both were arraigned. They won’t be back in front of a judge until April 24.
“Thankfully, with proper care, the young girl is quickly recovering from the horrors she allegedly endured at the hands of her parents,” Donnelly said, as Long Island Press reported.
She’s recovering. That’s the fact worth carrying out of this story.
On the legal mechanics: first-degree assault in New York isn’t an easy charge to stick. Under New York Penal Law section 120.10, prosecutors must establish that serious physical injury was intentionally caused, either with a deadly weapon, a dangerous instrument, or under specific aggravated circumstances. The documented burns covering a toddler’s chest and lower body, the open wounds, the untreated lacerations, the months of deliberate starvation. That stack of medical evidence from the June 8 hospitalization will be the backbone of the prosecution’s case. The conviction carries a maximum sentence of 25 years.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has documented repeatedly that injuries in varying stages of healing, particularly in young children, represent one of the clearest clinical indicators of sustained abuse rather than isolated incident. That’s the pattern prosecutors say the evidence shows here.
Donnelly’s office has flagged child welfare prosecutions as a core priority since she took office, and this case is exactly the kind that lands on the front of a DA’s desk. The indictment came down in 2026, roughly ten months after the hospitalization that brought this child to the attention of authorities. It’s a 2024 to 2025 to 2026 timeline that no family court or criminal court wants to see repeated.
Francois and Decius are due back before a judge on April 24. The charges they’re facing carry penalties that could keep both of them away from any child for decades. Whether that outcome materializes depends on what Nassau County prosecutors can prove. Based on what hospital staff documented on June 8, they won’t be starting from zero.
The girl is 13 words into the DA’s statement before she becomes a child who is recovering. That’s where this ends, for now.