In the middle of the night on Dec. 5, a woman in a Brooklyn apartment heard troubling sounds a few doors away: a boy wailing, a man shouting, women screaming and what seemed to be a hand striking bare skin.

She texted 911. “They are beating a child,” she wrote to the dispatcher. “You can hear the hits down the hall.”

Two hours later, two officers arrived at the building, on Flatbush Avenue in the Midwood neighborhood. The officers’ visit was captured on footage recorded by their body-worn cameras, which three senior law enforcement officials described to The New York Times.

The officers knocked on the door of the apartment where the commotion had been reported. A woman answered. They did not ask for her name.

The woman said there were two children in the apartment and that both were asleep. After several minutes of questioning, the officers decided the case was unfounded and left. They never saw 3-year-old Kyng Davis.

Three months later, on March 9, Kyng’s mother, Sunshyne Davis, 24, and her boyfriend, Robert White, brought him to a hospital in Brooklyn, where he was pronounced dead. Soon after, they abandoned his body.