Family of suspected subway shover says NYC failed her as Eric Adams admin insists it’s ‘proud’ of its mental health outreach
The family of the troubled woman accused of shoving two tourists onto subway train tracks this week accused the city of failing to get her help — even as officials in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration insisted Tuesday they’re “proud” of their mental health outreach work.
Clarence Butts, of Brooklyn, said the city didn’t do enough for his stepdaughter Ebony — a 42-year-old with a long history of mental health struggles now charged with randomly pushing two women from Mexico off the platform in a Lower East Side subway station.
“If they had done more, this would have never happened,” Clarence told The Post Tuesday from his Crown Heights home.
“I’m sorry for what happened, but they ain’t doing nothing for people out there that needs help.”
Butts’ blunt assessment came shortly after the mayor and City Hall officials painted a rosy portrait of their work dealing with unbalanced New Yorkers, including swarms of drugged-up weirdos taking over swaths of the West Side.
The “SCOUT” teams — one of a constellation of mental health teams working on outreach across the city — have helped 170 New Yorkers on the subways, said Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom in response to The Post’s question.
“I actually am proud of the teams that are doing this mental health work,” she said during the weekly City Hall off-topic news conference.
But whatever work the teams are doing is apparently falling short of helping some New Yorkers with mental health problems such as Butts, whose sister told the New York Daily News was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
“For like 20 years, I’ve been back and forth trying to get her help,” Tueniesha Butts, 47, who lives in Maryland, told the local paper about her sister, who she said had also suffered from cancer and related surgeries.
“She’s been on medication. I brought her to Maryland trying to take care of her. She’s diagnosed as schizophrenic, bipolar, manic, and all of this and nobody acts like they wanted to help me,” she said.
“All I wanted was to get somebody to help me with her, a home health aide because I work. Somebody to look after her because I have kids of my own. I couldn’t get that.”
The city’s mental health crisis has also spilled out above ground, with Manhattan Councilman Eric Bottcher, in a recent letter begging Adams for aid, deeming the situation on the West Side a “humanitarian crisis.”
Tourists and workers in the “gateway” neighborhood are not only greeted by the glittering sights of Times Square and Broadway, but also tableaus of human misery, he wrote.
Mentally ill, openly drug-using homeless people brawled, dozed on concrete barriers, washed their feet with soda, urinated topless while wearing a Burger King crown, puffed crack pipes and injected drugs into their arms when The Post visited the beleaguered area in recent weeks.
Bottcher argued that many social services — including B-HEARD, a pilot program in which mental health workers help respond to 911 calls — have largely bypassed Manhattan’s West Side.
The Post spoke with workers and tourists who recounted stories of vagrants taking over a Holiday Inn’s public plaza and littering it with drug needles, scaring off customers and spitting at families.
Adams largely dodged The Post’s questions Tuesday about Bottcher’s concerns and his administration’s effectiveness helping mentally ill New Yorkers.
He instead tried to blame the City Council for recently passing a law that gives people the right to sleep outdoors in public areas, arguing it hampers efforts to clear out the homeless.
Hizzoner did vaguely hint that Midtown and the West Side soon would see a coordinated effort by NYPD and mental health workers, such the SCOUT program that focused on subways.
“We’re going to go out and deal with some of those quality-of-life issues,” he said.
