"I never finished 'cause I was looking for a place to stay," she said. "I needed help. I didn't have the time."

'No place to go'

By early 2005, Hargrove had grown weary of her daughter's drug use and of her boyfriend, Larry Prather, Khiseer's father.

"I didn't want them around my house when I wasn't there," Hargrove said.

Davis and Khiseer moved into Acts II, a large Philadelphia shelter.

There, Davis made progress. A welfare-to-work program arranged a job at the city Department of Licenses and Inspection. Occasionally a DHS worker checked in on her, she said.

But in May, Davis got back together with Prather and left the shelter. She stayed at a couple of different addresses during the next two months. And she was pregnant again.

Eventually a city-paid social worker visited her at one of the homes. Davis said she had hid her pregnancy from the worker.

"Nobody wants DHS involved in your life," she said.

Hargrove struggled over what to do, she said. She wanted to support her daughter and worried over the fate of the unborn baby, but she couldn't trust Davis to be alone in her home. To make things worse, Hargrove and her husband said, Prather beat Davis, but she stayed with him anyway.

Prather did not respond to phone calls for this article or to a visit to his home.

"I ran out of options," Davis said. "My family didn't want him around, and I had no place to go," she said.

By August, she had moved with Prather into the basement of a rowhouse owned by his family. The basement had only a small heater and no running water.

Things were turning grim. Neither she nor Prather had a job, and Davis worried about finding enough food for Khiseer and herself.

She was due in October.

A call to 911

The paramedics who responded to the 911 call the night Ciani died tried their best to save her. Even though her body was cold, they intubated her and raced her to Temple University Hospital. The 10-week-old was given an IV and epinephrine to jump-start her heart while workers tried to warm her.

They worked on her for 35 minutes. She was pronounced dead at 9:05 p.m.

To this day, it's unclear what happened.