By the time 13-year-old Jade Smith climbed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, her family believes the most important decisions about her life had already been taken out of their hands. They say the city pulled her from the only people who truly knew her, then failed to keep her safe as she unraveled. Now, after her death, they are trying to piece together how a child who needed help instead slipped through the cracks of a system that was supposed to protect her.
Their lawsuit and public pleas are not just about one tragedy. They are an indictment of how New York City handles its most vulnerable kids, from the first hotline call to the last case note. In their telling, Jade did not simply die by suicide, she died after being taken from them and left to navigate a dangerous world of foster care, mental illness, and bureaucratic neglect.
The Night On The Bridge
On a cold night in New York City, Jade Smith made her way onto the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the city’s most iconic structures, and jumped into the dark water below. She was just 13 years old, a middle schooler whose life should have been about homework, TikTok trends, and arguing over curfews, not a fatal plunge into the East River. First responders later recovered the body of the Brooklyn teen who had leapt from the span, a scene that would haunt her family and the emergency crews who tried to save her.
Her suicide on the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River in New York City did not come out of nowhere, according to relatives. They describe a long slide that began when child-welfare officials in NYC removed Jade from home and placed her in foster care. In their view, that decision set off a chain of events that ended on the bridge, turning what one social media post called a TRAGIC and “Sadly” predictable outcome into a public reckoning.
A Family’s Claim She Was “Taken”
From the start, Jade’s relatives have framed her death as something that did not just happen to them, but was done to them. The family of 13-year-old Jade Smith says she died after being taken from them by New York City’s child-welfare system, a move they argue ripped away her stability and sense of safety. They insist that once she was removed, they were sidelined, treated less like parents and more like bystanders to their own child’s crisis…