As 6-year-old Zymere Perkins lay dying from a brutal beating by his mom’s boyfriend, she spent 10 minutes putting on her makeup and a wig before taking the child to the hospital.
The shocking disclosure came as Geraldine Perkins recounted the horrific last 24 hours of Zymere’s short but unbearably cruel life while testifying in ex Rysheim Smith’s murder trial in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“Why’d you do that?” Assistant DA Kerry O’Connell asked Perkins, 29, of her heartless beauty routine.
“Because I’m very self-conscious how I look outside,” she replied.
The boy was unconscious and likely already dead, according to prosecutors.
Perkins has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and agreed to cooperate against her ex-lover in exchange for two to six years in prison.
On Sept. 25, 2016, one day before the child died, Perkins and Smith dined on Chinese takeout in front of Zymere, who was forbidden food or water as a punishment. He had gotten into trouble, Perkins said — though she couldn’t remember the transgression.
That night, the child, hungry and filthy, curled up on the living room floor alone and went to sleep.
Perkins said she heard Zymere awake in the middle of the night.
“At first I thought it was a mouse — but it was him in the living room, eating out of the garbage,” she said.
She chastised the starving child and snatched away the trash bag.
The next morning, Smith discovered that Zymere had defecated in the living room and grew enraged. “He was scared, he didn’t say nothing,” Perkins recalled of her son’s demeanor. “He was shaking.”
Unmoved, Perkins also berated the child, whose underwear and shirt were smeared with feces.
Smith then lifted Zymere off the ground by his shirt and used a broken, lime-green broomstick handle to batter his chest and legs “like a rag doll.”
“He was screaming and crying,” she said of her son. Smith dragged Zymere to the bathroom and held him under a frigid shower then bludgeoned him with a curtain rod.
“He was going limp,” Perkins told repulsed jurors. “I figured he was just faking.”
Smith hung the unconscious boy on a hook in his cold, wet clothes. After Perkins plucked him down, Smith threw him toward a bed but missed. Zymere hit the wall and crumpled to the floor.
“What did he look like?” the prosecutor asked.
“Like he was dead,” she replied, coldly.
Smith ordered Perkins to clean up the apartment and read her Bible while he went out to get food. At least a half-hour passed before she checked on Zymere and realized he wasn’t breathing.
She gave him a bath then dressed him and laid him on the bed while she waited for Smith to return.
“What were you thinking about?”O’Connell asked.
“That my baby is dead, and I’m going to be in jail, and I’m in a lot of trouble,” she replied.
Once Smith returned, he told her to take the boy to the hospital and say he was sickened by food poisoning and not to mention that they had ever been in his Harlem apartment, she said.
She calmly applied her makeup, donned her wig and got dressed — then carried her son’s lifeless body to a cab that drove them to St. Luke’s Hospital.
Once there, she suddenly became hysterical.
“I was just praying he’d come out of whatever he was in, just hoping he’d wake up,” Perkins recalled, sobbing on the stand.
An autopsy revealed that Zymere had sustained more than 30 rib fractures and his entire body was covered in cuts and bruises.
Smith faces up to life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder, manslaughter and other charges.