The Mother Who Will Not Speak
When Jacqueline Pritchett’s 11-year-old son, Jacob, vanished last year, she refused to acknowledge that he existed. Her life is as mysterious as his disappearance.
Jacqueline Pritchett seldom let people into her apartment in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where she lived with her 11-year-old son, Jacob. Not even family.
More than a year ago, one of her two sisters stood on the sidewalk outside the apartment and looked up at a second-story window. Staring down at her from behind the black metal bars that covered all of the building’s windows was Jacob, a nonverbal boy with autism. He was so small for his age some neighbors thought he was 7.
She waved. Jacob waved back.
It was the last time she would see him, according to relatives and the police. It was, it appears, the last time anyone would remember seeing him. Jacob’s disappearance has baffled the police who have scoured hundreds of hours of surveillance footage taken from the building but found no images of Jacob. Joined by the State Police, they traveled 330 miles to upstate New York to a landfill where they searched through 2.9 million pounds of raw garbage, looking, without success, for any sign of Jacob.
On Dec. 30 she appeared virtually in Brooklyn Family Court. It was at least the 10th time she had appeared in court in three months, and it was at least the 10th time she had refused to reveal any information about Jacob’s whereabouts. Instead, she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The New York Times could not reach Jacqueline Pritchett, who has not been charged with a crime and whose last known address was a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Her lawyers from Brooklyn Defenders, who represented her during the Family Court proceedings, did not respond to messages for comment.
The police and prosecutors said that so far they did not have evidence that would justify charging anyone. But as the search for Jacob continues, investigators are trying to understand: Who is Jacqueline Pritchett?
‘Very Intelligent’
Jacqueline Pritchett grew up in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, then in Park Slope in Brooklyn, the youngest of three sisters. They were raised by their single mother, Marion Pritchett, who worked as an assistant buyer for JCPenney. As a child, Jacqueline Pritchett read voraciously and was so good at math that she would help her oldest sister Dorothy Pritchett with her algebra homework.
“She was very intelligent. Still is,” said Dorothy Pritchett, 58, of her younger sister, who is now 50. “I thought she would be a doctor or something.”
Jacqueline Pritchett qualified as a Gates Millennium scholar, a scholarship for high-achieving minority students, according to relatives. She graduated at the top of her class from the High School of Fashion Industries in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, Dorothy Pritchett said, recalling the numerous academic awards she got that day.
“I was a little jealous,” she said.
Jacqueline Pritchett later entered a master’s program for adult education and human resource development at Fordham University. She stood out as an ambitious student who was interested in motivational speaking, said Kathleen King, who was a professor in the program and an editor of “Perspectives,” a journal dedicated to adult education that Jacqueline Pritchett contributed to.
“She was passionate,” Professor King said. “She cared a lot about people.”
Professor King described Jacqueline Pritchett as “very earnest” and “very dedicated to her studies.”
“She was somebody that was a go getter and trying to really find her way,” Professor King said.
In the early 2000s, at a community event in Fulton Park in Brooklyn, Jacqueline Pritchett met Sid Washington, a Parks Department employee who was also a poet.
They struck up a friendship and met at bars or in the park to discuss each other’s poems. Together, they wrote a poem titled “Shadows of Daddy,” about a father whose daughter had not seen him in 30 years. “My father was very absent in my life,” Mr. Washington, 60, said. “For her, it was pretty much the same — our fathers not really being in our lives.”
She laughed easily, he said, and shopped in vintage stores and gave herself a 1970s look with long, asymmetrical skirts, colorful scarves and knee-high boots. In 2005, after she left for California to attend Pepperdine University to earn a Ph.D., she published a book of poems, titled “Falling In and Out.” Mr. Washington designed the cover, featuring an ankh, a symbol from ancient Egypt that resembles a cross, but with a loop atop that was nestled in a butterfly.
Ms. Pritchett wrote poems that were examinations of feelings about sex and love.
The design was supposed to reflect the theme of the book — falling in and out of love, Mr. Washington said.
Though Jacqueline Pritchett revealed little about her own life, her poems were intimate and ranged from frightening examinations of feelings about sex, rape, violence and seduction to tender, hopeful odes. One poem, “A Beautiful Thing,” described a fantasy of having her lover’s baby: “Your fatherly hands caressing my earthly round belly/While pulling close your ear to listen/to your child float about.”
By 2009, she had left Pepperdine and soon after returned to New York, without a doctorate. Her family did not know why she had not completed her studies and did not know why she was back.
‘My Baby Forever’
Her love life was just as shrouded — she dated a man whom her sisters did not meet and who seemed possessive and controlling, according to her family.
The couple broke up, and Jacqueline Pritchett entered the city’s shelter system.
She was living in a Catholic shelter in Brooklyn when Jacob was born on April 30, 2014, according to her family. She never told them who the father was.
For about two years, she and her baby lived in shelters until her other sister, who did not want to be identified to protect her privacy, told her she might qualify for disability
under a state law that allows victims of domestic violence to qualify for time off. Sometime around 2016, when Jacob was 2, the shelter she was in helped her find an apartment in Brownsville, according to her family. Jacqueline Pritchett used her disability check and Social Security funds to cover the $443 monthly rent, according to her family. Her sister bought her twin mattresses, toys and clothes and paid for Jacob’s diapers.
Jacqueline Pritchett doted on her son, but her affection turned to protection and then isolation, relatives said.
Once, when her mother suggested that Jacqueline take her son to a neurologist, Jacqueline became incensed and did not speak to her for weeks, relatives said.
She did not allow her family to take photos of the rambunctious, energetic boy whose favorite toys were Matchbox cars that he would spend hours pushing around on the floor.
Outside the apartment, he would run away from his mother, zipping down the sidewalk as she called after him. She often strapped Jacob to a stroller, even when he was too old to be in one, to keep him from running off, according to neighbors and her family.
Dorothy Pritchett remembered when her sister came to visit her when Jacob was still a toddler. Jacqueline Pritchett looked at him lovingly as he ran around the house. “He’s going to be my baby forever,” Dorothy Pritchett recalled her sister saying.
But she changed phones and even phone numbers frequently, making it difficult for anyone to stay in touch, according to her family. Her relatives said they did not know what jobs she had, but she paid her rent on time.
The family, who lived outside the city, believed Jacqueline Pritchett was struggling with mental health issues, but no one wanted to push too hard or ask too many questions for fear that she might further shut them out. And besides, Jacob seemed OK.
But neighbors began noticing troubling signs — Jacob was sometimes left alone in his stroller in the building lobby. One neighbor recalled sitting with him once for several minutes, waiting for his mother to come back for him.
On Aug. 24, 2017, someone called 911 after hearing a child screaming from the apartment. But when the police came, the boy seemed fine, and the officer filed a report classifying the incident as a “non-crime.”
Antony Rodriguez, 70, who worked at his brother’s bodega next to the building, said that when Jacqueline Pritchett first moved there 10 years ago, she dressed nicely and wore her hair neatly. But in recent years, her clothes looked stained and worn, her hair always messy. She would buy gallons of milk at a time and return to the store the next day to buy more.
“She had good days and bad days,” he said.
And Jacob hardly ever came outside anymore. Mr. Rodriguez often saw him in the window, pushing a toy car back and forth on the sill.
Kerry Kramer, a general manager of the company that oversaw construction projects at Jacqueline Pritchett’s building, caught a glimpse of Jacob in April 2024. He had dropped by the apartment where the mother and son lived to talk about some renovations.
When Jacqueline Pritchett answered, Jacob ran up behind her. “Hey, buddy, how you doing?” Mr. Kramer recalled saying, according to court transcripts.
Jacqueline Pritchett shooed away her son. When Mr. Kramer returned another day, she told him to leave, using an expletive, and calling him a “cracker and a honky,” he said.
When he returned for a third time, she did not answer the door, but he heard movement inside.
On Sept. 25, a neighbor called the city’s Administration for Children’s Services to report that Jacob had not been seen in months and his mother seemed unstable, according to officials. On Oct. 1, a caseworker and a police officer returned to what they described as a “spotless” apartment with black crosses on the walls, flowers hanging upside down and two mattresses, one on the living room floor and another in the bedroom. There were toys in the bathroom, closet and a bedroom.
There were also strong “smells of cleaning products,” said the caseworker, Gabriel Martindale. But there was no Jacob.
Questioned, Jacqueline Pritchett grew more and more agitated, telling Mr. Martindale and the officer that “she’s never had a child, that she has never had a period, that she’s never been with a man.”
She then said “that she is Jesus Christ,” Mr. Martindale said, according to court transcripts.
Jacqueline Pritchett was arrested and taken to a hospital for evaluation where she was physically restrained for nine days and kept under police guard.
On Oct. 10, Judge Dawn M. Orsatti held her in contempt of a court order after she would not reveal Jacob’s whereabouts. She was held for more than eight weeks on Rikers Island and
released after a state Supreme Court justice agreed with her lawyers that she had been wrongly held for exercising her constitutional rights.
But she was evicted from her apartment, and her time on Rikers did not lead to any disclosures about Jacob.
When police searched her home, a cadaver dog discovered blood on the refrigerator and on a mattress near the dumpsters outside, prompting the unsuccessful search in the upstate landfill.
“In a perfect world, the kid pops up somewhere,” said Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives. “Most likely, it’s going to be a homicide.”
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