Elizabeth Whitcomb said she was walking down Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, one evening this past spring when she noticed a man walking right beside her.

“Then he just grabbed my shoulders all of a sudden and pushed me,” she said.

Whitcomb, who was too nervous to look back, kept walking.

She said that although she wasn’t physically hurt, she was confused, overwhelmed and shaken up.

The next morning, Whitcomb posted about what happened to her on a Greenpoint Reddit thread. She described the man’s appearance after someone asked what he looked like. Soon, several people responded, describing similar encounters with the same man.

That’s when Whitcomb realized the seemingly random shove on the street wasn’t so random after all.

Court records show the man who pushed Whitcomb currently faces charges ranging from harassment and menacing to assault and illegal possession of a knife. He has also been accused of groping and assaulting women on the north side of the neighborhood and is on the state’s sex offender registry for forcible touching and sexual abuse convictions in 2017 and 2021. He denied the most recent charges against him at a recent court appearance and said there was “no evidence.”

According to city officials, the man has gone to jail and psychiatric hospitals dozens of times. He has started and stopped treatment for alcoholism, according to court papers. He’s also deaf. And he and his mother say that, like half of the people in city jails, he has mental illness.

Across New York City, stories like this one play out every day, as the city grapples with worsening mental health and addiction crises. Some high-profile incidents make headlines. But smaller, day-to-day encounters can also erode New Yorkers’ sense of safety and expose the systemic failures that allow people to fall through the cracks.

Bed-Stuy residents have expressed fear and frustration on Reddit about a man who aggressively asks for money after he accuses passersby of breaking bottles in a bag he carries around. In Park Slope, a heated debate erupted last year after a man who residents believe is mentally ill beat a dog with a stick, causing the dog’s death.

In Greenpoint, the man accused of pushing Whitcomb has become the topic of email chains, meetings with local officials and multiple long Reddit threads. Interviews with more than a dozen people who live and work in the neighborhood reveal that assaults perpetrated both by and against the man have forced some in the neighborhood to interrogate their beliefs about the criminal justice and mental health systems. Greenpointers face a difficult question: when someone with serious mental illness poses a threat, what’s the best way to keep both the person and the community safe?

“People often say, ‘It’s only going to end when either he kills someone or he himself gets killed,’” Emma Davey, editor of the local publication Greenpointers, said in May. “There’s kind of this feeling out there that, you know, the situation is about to come to a breaking point.”

‘Is the option to move?’

Greenpoint residents say the debate over how to care for New Yorkers with untreated and severe mental illness has fiercely divided their neighborhood, a place where the average rent increased nearly 79% between 2010 and 2014, according to NYU’s Furman Center. NYPD data show the most common crimes in the local precinct are thefts.

Greenpoint, an enclave of Polish, Irish and Puerto Rican residents located on the northwestern tip of Brooklyn, is now bustling with coffee-making robots, trendy bars and pricey waterfront condos. Greenpoint’s representatives in the City Council and state Assembly are some of the city’s most progressive lawmakers, but heated debates about issues like redevelopment and bike lanes have underscored the fissures within the changing community.

Researchers have found that low-income and long-term residents who live in gentrifying neighborhoods tend to experience higher rates of psychological distress, often because of rising living costs and feelings of exclusion or cultural displacement. A 2017 study that tracked thousands of people who lived in gentrifying New York City communities found those who were displaced visited the emergency room or were hospitalized — mostly for mental health care — at even steeper levels.

The man at the center of the debate in Greenpoint was raised in the neighborhood, according to his mom and other longtime residents. Now state records show he’s homeless. He is Latino, and his father has worked as a local tailor, according to state records, other residents and past news reports.

Gothamist has chosen to withhold the man’s name because of his mental illness and because he is at risk of additional attacks by people who want to take matters into their own hands. There are Reddit threads and WhatsApp groups dedicated to tracking his movements in the neighborhood, and some people on those threads have threatened to hurt him. The man’s mother, Carmen, said people have beat him up twice after fliers were posted around the neighborhood with his photograph. His defense attorney declined to speak with Gothamist or make his client available for an interview.

Some residents said they don’t want the man to keep going back to jail. Nevertheless, many said they are afraid of encountering him on the street. That fear has made it difficult for them to buy groceries, walk home from the subway or pick their kids up from school on the north end of the neighborhood, where the assaults typically occur.

“There are moms who are scared — very, very scared,” said long-time resident Francoise Olivas, who described mothers pushing strollers with their keys between their fingers like brass knuckles, in case they need to defend themselves.

Deborah Spiroff is a victims advocate who lives in Greenpoint and has provided support to many of the people who say they’ve been harmed by the man. She said they often tell her they don’t want to report what happened, because they feel like it’s not worth it.

“No one’s giving anyone any coping skills on what to do in this situation other than avoid it,” she said. “Well, that doesn’t help. I mean, is the option to move?”

A local community group has set up a hotline and offered to walk people around the neighborhood if they’re scared. But Spiroff said it’s not realistic to expect residents to call a stranger every time they need to run an errand.

She wants the people with power in Greenpoint to take more sweeping action to help this person and to restore a sense of safety in the community.

Local Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who co-chairs the progressive caucus and is an outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform, said his office has been working with residents, police, prosecutors and the health department to help the man. He said they secured him a spot in an intensive mental health treatment program before an arrest over the summer disconnected him from those services.

“I am just incredibly disappointed by how slow this all moves,” he said. “While everybody deserves and needs due process, when we have somebody in crisis, we should be able to work together much more quickly to get the help and treatment and support that is needed to stabilize the situation.”

Oren Yaniv, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said in a statement that prosecutors have been working diligently to connect this man with the services he needs to address his behavior and keep Greenpoint safe. If all else fails, he said, the DA’s office is prepared to go to trial and ask for jail time.

Stuck in a holding pattern

Research shows that a tiny fraction of people with serious mental illness commit acts of violence. Even when they do, experts say, other factors besides their diagnosis typically drive them to commit those crimes.

And people with a history of mental illness have been harmed themselves during violent encounters. Police have shot several New Yorkers who were seemingly in mental distress in recent months. Earlier this year, Daniel Penny fatally choked Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who Penny said was “going crazy” and acting aggressively toward fellow subway riders.

Mental health advocates and clinicians say these cases highlight significant problems with how the city responds to people with serious mental illnesses.

They point to the lasting legacy of deinstitutionalization, when the United States began to empty its psychiatric hospitals in the mid-20th century and pledged to provide services in communities instead. But sufficient resources never materialized, said Matt Kudish, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City.

“The investment in community mental health never happened,” he said.

Hospitals have also struggled to keep up. The city lost 459 psychiatric beds between 2000 and 2018, according to a report from the New York State Nurses Association. Even more were lost during the pandemic to make space for COVID-19 patients.

Clinical psychologist Philip Yanos said the pandemic exacerbated long-standing barriers to care. He said providers stopped offering in-person services at the height of COVID-19 and not all have resumed that care. People with the most serious needs, he said, typically were not a good fit for telehealth and often received no treatment instead.

“We were just disconnected for too long,” said Yanos, who treats patients with severe mental illness. “I think that it put more people at risk of disengagement and psychiatric relapse.”

Kudish said many New Yorkers with serious mental illness feel lost.

“There’s no one sort of consistently on that person’s side, looking out for them, helping them navigate New York City’s very complicated, complex, difficult-to-manage mental health system,” he said. “So I think, you know, we cycle through and we kind of pass the baton.”

Mayor Eric Adams has rolled out several initiatives aimed at improving the city’s response to severe mental illness, including sending teams of mental health workers into the subways and directing first responders to take people to the hospital for psychological evaluations if they can’t take care of themselves — even if they don’t pose a public safety threat. But many of those plans have sparked backlash and even lawsuits.

Mental health advocates, people with mental illness, elected officials and members of law enforcement told Gothamist that many New Yorkers are stuck in a holding pattern: Clinicians may try to connect them with services, but resources are often unavailable or the person is unwilling to be treated. Police may arrest a person in crisis or take them to the hospital, but jail and hospital stays are rarely long-term and sometimes cause more harm by disconnecting people from their communities and putting them in potentially traumatizing environments. After each failed attempt at treatment, people with serious mental illness are back on their own, sharing the city with people who feel uncomfortable — or even unsafe — in their presence.

“If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, the way New York City is treating people living with mental illness is insane,” Kudish said.

‘No freaking help’

Ibrahim Ayu knows what it’s like to feel stuck in that cycle. Ayu, 42, has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Like the man in Greenpoint, he has been jailed and hospitalized many times. But he said his stays in mental hospitals haven’t been particularly helpful.

“You’re just sitting there waiting,” said Ayu, an advocate with the nonprofit VOCAL-NY. “Then somebody comes by and says, ‘Are you feeling suicidal or homicidal?’”

If you say no, he said, then you’re released.

“You’re here to get some help,” he said. “You ain’t getting no freaking help.”

Ayu said he has lost a lot in his life: his marriage, his career as a lawyer, his home. He said his temper — which tends to get him in trouble — is partly to blame. But Ayu said his anger is often triggered by his mental illness and the traumas he experienced as a child, when he said he was molested.

“I didn’t know how to process it,” he said.

Ayu, who is homeless but spends most of his time in Crown Heights, said he often feels misunderstood and even villainized by the people around him.

Ayu doesn’t know the man in Greenpoint, but he wonders if the man also feels misunderstood. He wishes residents of the neighborhood would make more of an effort to build a relationship with him and find out what he needs, instead of trying to remove him.

“Everybody’s always looking at the community as what they can get rid of,” Ayu said. “I’m looking for people and communities, like, what can you put in here that can change, that can flip the script?”

The view from mental health court

One morning in July, a steady stream of defendants appeared before a judge in a cold, fluorescently lit room on the sixth floor of Kings County Criminal Court. Their cases had all ended up in the borough’s misdemeanor mental health court, a special program that aims to connect people accused of minor crimes with psychological treatment.

One woman in a white dress with long, wavy hair, said she didn’t want a mental health evaluation and asked for a new attorney. She said her lawyer was pressuring her to plead guilty and speaking to her disrespectfully. The judge urged her to stick with her current counsel; she had already changed lawyers four times.

An older man who used a cane could barely make his way to the stand. His attorney had to wrap her arm around him and walk him step by step to the front of the courtroom. Another man sat in the gallery, quietly reading a packet about dialectical behavior therapy.

After hours of waiting, the man from Greenpoint stood before the judge, wearing jeans and a salmon-colored T-shirt. He was facing half a dozen cases from different incidents over the last few weeks.

While an interpreter signed along, the man’s defense attorney, Joseph Kral with Brooklyn Defender Services, said his client had been visiting the neurology department at a local hospital and would undergo a psychological evaluation to find out if he’s fit to stand trial. If he’s not, the cases against him could be dropped, and the man could be committed to a hospital until medical professionals decide he’s not a danger to the community. He was free to go in the meantime.

Less than two weeks after that court date, the man was arrested again on menacing and assault charges and sent to Rikers. A judge set his bail at $25,000 cash or $50,000 bond. Three months later, he’s still incarcerated while he awaits the results of his psychological exam. At his latest court appearance earlier this week, an officer uncuffed his hands so he could communicate using sign language, and an interpreter told the judge the man didn’t understand why there were still cases against him — that he doesn’t think there’s any evidence.

“I have some problems. I have this disability. And I’m having a hard time,” the interpreter said for the man. “And I’m going to therapy. I have someone who’s helping me.”

The man repeatedly confused the number of cases against him. He said he felt “very emotional.”

“I feel angry and stressed and frustrated. Very frustrated,” he said.

In a brief interview in the Brooklyn courthouse, the man’s mother, Carmen, said her son has not been the same since he was 8, when his older brother died suddenly. At the funeral, she said, he tried to pull his brother out of the casket and carry him home.

With her son on Rikers, Carmen is worried about the conditions in the violent jail complex. She said she tries to see her son, but added that it’s difficult to get inside with so many other visitors vying for limited spots. A correctional officer told her to try visiting between midnight and 1 a.m., when it’s quieter, she said.

“No mother deserves this,” she said. “Nobody deserves this.”