A Long Island father bitterly blamed bureaucrats and courts yesterday for the drowning death of his 2-year-old daughter Gina at the hand of her mentally ill mother.
“Something has to change so that this doesn’t happen to anyone ever again,” Brian Ramirez said.
Gina was drowned in a bathtub Wednesday by Michelle Sambriski, Ramirez’s former girlfriend, who feared that a Family Court judge would give the baby to him, authorities said.
Sambriski, 34, of Freeport, then hanged herself.
Ramirez charged that Nassau County Child Protective Services and Family Court workers ignored his claims in May and June that Sambriski was off her medication and dangerous.
“They said ‘Take a number. Nassau County is understaffed. Next!’ ” he said.
Ramirez, a LIRR conductor, and Sambriski had been dating on and off when she told him three years ago she was pregnant with his child – then disappeared until after Gina was born in November 2000.
Sambriski vanished again, but e-mailed Ramirez’s mother in Puerto Rico to say “it will be a cold day in hell” before she ever let him see his daughter.
When Ramirez found out about the e-mail, “I begged my mother and she told me” where the baby had been taken.
“I called CPS and said, ‘I know where she is – get the hell over there.’ “
But he said the next day a CPS worker arrived at his house “and told me they were investigating me.”
Ramirez, 30, said Sambriski smoked marijuana and was mentally ill, but the investigator asked him repeatedly where he had been for a year.
“He wouldn’t listen,” he said. “I told him she was the one who ran off but he kept asking me where I had been for the last year.
“If you’re a man, you’re wrong,” he said. “Fathers should have more rights than they do. It’s not equal.”
On Thursday, Ramirez was due to return to Family Court to seek visitation rights. But the bodies of Gina and Sambriski were found the day before in the Freeport home of Sambriski’s cousin.
Gina’s body was returned to Ramirez for burial.
“She was a gorgeous, gorgeous girl. She was very smart,” Ramirez told The Post at his East Rockaway home.
“I have her now.”
Nassau County Social Services Commissioner Bob Sherman said Sambriski was investigated and no abuse was found.