Fresh proof Hochul & Co. are failing to control the violently mentally ill
It never ends: A man described as emotionally disturbed who’d been arrested 42 times, including for violent attacks, was nonetheless left roaming freely to allegedly pummel a hero subway cleaner last week.
Expect such horrors to continue until New York’s leaders finally get serious about keeping dangerous individuals — the mentally ill and criminals — from public spaces.
Alexander Wright, 49, is ID’d as the perp in the vicious beating of MTA worker Anthony Nelson, who tried to stop him from harassing riders. Yet Wright shouldn’t have been loose: By last year he’d already become a poster-boy for the systems’ revolving doors, accused of throwing scalding coffee at two traffic agents (among numerous other crimes just in 2021).
After video showed him randomly slugging a 55-year-old woman that year, then-Police Commissioner Dermot Shea fumed about “releasing these people right back onto the streets.” Yet after a psych evaluation at Bellevue, Wright got . . . released right back onto the streets. Again.
Weak criminal-justice laws and soft-on-crime judges and prosecutors are part of the problem. Yet our mental-health system typically sends such violently sick people back out into the world without proper treatment, the risk to the public be damned.
Nelson, thank goodness, wasn’t killed, but Michelle Go — shoved in front of a subway train by a deranged man in January — wasn’t so lucky. Her attacker, Martial Simon, had a long history of mental illness and even warned a hospital psychiatrist that he was going to push someone onto the tracks. The door revolved anyway.
In April, a madman detonated a smoke bomb and randomly shot riders on a Brooklyn subway car. In a video, the accused assailant, Frank James, warned he was full of anger, calling himself a “victim” of the mental-health system. He, too, had been set free to terrorize.
The list of attacks by the mentally ill — including a rash of subway shovings — is long. Yet leaders like Gov. Kathy Hochul and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie pretend there’s no problem at all.
“Leave your vehicles home; you can get to work safely” via mass transit (and thus fight climate change), Hochul said cheerily the other day. Safely? Tell that to Michelle Go’s family or the riders on that Brooklyn train.
Yes, this year Albany tweaked Kendra’s Law, which lets judges force people into treatment, and provided some money for more psychiatric beds. Yet those measures fall far short.
Until Hochul, Heastie and, yes, Mayor Eric Adams get far more aggressive about getting violent, sick individuals off the streets and into treatment — via stronger laws, more funding, better enforcement, more responsible mental-health facilities or all the above — the public has every right to fear.
