The young New Yorker, who lived with severe mental illness, was known to hospitals, police and social services. Why did the city fail him?
Ten years before he was killed on the New York subway,Every morning, he would walk across the Washington Bridge connecting the Bronx to Upper Manhattan. In his red Michael Jackson jacket, he was easy to see coming. When he got to the corner store near 181st Street, he’d meet Jony Espinal, a local resident who befriended Neely after recognizing him from online videos.recalls.
Neely was killed on 1 May 2023, by a subway passenger, Daniel Penny, who put him in a chokehold. According to eyewitnesses, Neely had been yelling that he was hungry and thirsty, and that he didn’t care if he went to jail. Pennyhile the manner of Neely’s killing has sparked a national controversy, less attention has been paid to how Neely slipped through the cracks ofCity’s social safety net.
Neely had little stability in the rest of his life. After his mother was murdered, he moved in with his grandparents but acted out and cut school. “He will not listen to me or his grandfather,” his grandmother told authorities in 2009. In 2010, Neely threatened to kill his grandfather, and ended up sleeping in the building’s hallway, neighbors said.
Moles says children in foster care can still thrive if they have a champion, like Casa-NYC’s court-appointed advocates. “All it really takes is one person who is in their corner and can be a cheerleader and a continuous support system for them,” she says. In many New York City shelters, residents aren’t allowed to stay past mornings, but must return before a strict nighttime curfew or lose their bed. They can’t cook or even bring their food inside. “You don’t have autonomy over your own diet. There’s a lot of power that you lose when you are in these spaces,” Cerisier says. Often, the food that shelters offer is spoiled, unhealthy, or inedible. “These are adults eating Frosted Flakes and a loaf of bread as a daily meal,” she says.
But New York City law requires people to stay in a shelter for 90 days before they can apply for supportive housing, and even then, vacancies for units are scant. Recent data shows just 16% of New Yorkers who are approved for supportive housing actually get placed in a unit. Mayor Eric Adams changed his tone on Neely’s death on Wednesday, saying: ‘We must keep trying before we lose another Jordan.’Separately, there are mobile treatment teams, which provide continuous care to assigned homeless people with mental illness. In agency lingo, they’re called assertive community treatment teams, or intensive mobile treatment teams for particularly tough cases.
But the teams can struggle to keep track of their clients. “There’s so many different programs and so many different teams in the city that have access to pieces of the information” about a homeless person, says Diesch. “Often there’s duplication of outreach happening.” If a client ends up arrested or hospitalized, often the team won’t learn of it until days afterward.
Over the last decade, police reportedly arrested Neely 42 times for infractions such as drug use and fare beating, and responded to another 43 calls for an “aided case”, meaning someone reported that Neely was sick, injured, or mentally ill.
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