The man wore a long-sleeve dark shirt and ball cap over his mirrored sunglasses. Strapped to his back was a long sword in a sheath. He quietly entered a subway car and stood near a pole, as still as a shadow.
Minutes later — chaos. A panhandler had provoked him, and the man punched him and pulled the sword from its sheath. Passengers screamed and fled the subway car at the next stop, Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. The man with the sword, Selwyn Bernardez, struck the panhandler and was arrested and charged with assault.
In the tabloids, he was given a new name. The “Subway Ninja.”
It was 2022, and the city was emerging tentatively from the depths of the pandemic. Mr. Bernardez seemed like another dangerous menace in the crowded trains below ground, further rattling passengers already on guard. People like him instill fear, then get caught, and the police and city leaders promise more officers, more programs for the mentally ill.
They wind up in jail or institutionalized, often for the rest of their lives. Any questions about their actions go unanswered. They are rarely heard from again.
But the Subway Ninja? He would like to explain.
A winding path
The year 2022 had begun on a high note for Mr. Bernardez.
He had repaired his troubled relationship with his mother, Evelyn, and the two visited often near her home in the Bronx. Ms. Bernardez had lost custody of her six children when they were young. Five of the siblings were adopted by a family in North Carolina, but Selwyn stayed in New York, where he grew up in foster and group homes.
He emerged as a success story from the Center for Fair Futures, an advocacy group that seeks to help children in foster care from middle and high school all the way through age 26 by providing coaching and mentoring.
He had an apartment in the Albany Houses in Crown Heights. He was spending more and more time with his mother. He played tour guide to his siblings when they visited from North Carolina.
Then his mother fell ill. She received a bone-marrow transplant. The operation seemed a success.
“Two days later, she’s feeling good,” Mr. Bernardez said. “Three days later, my mom goes into a coma.”
She had suffered internal bleeding in her brain, doctors told him. “This can’t be happening,” he remembered thinking. “It’s not making sense to me. Make it make sense. They’re like, ‘It’s highly unlikely your mom will ever be normal again.’”
He went home, but couldn’t sleep. He smoked marijuana and, for the first time, he sought out cocaine. His was not a gradual decline. He ran toward the cliff and went over.
“I broke mirrors. I flipped my house upside down,” he said. “Everything was on the floor. I called the cops. ‘I don’t know what I’m feeling right now, I need a specialist.’ Thirty minutes go by. I hear a knocking at the door.”
A group of 10 or so officers arrived and pounded on the door until he opened up. He has since obtained body-camera footage of two officers present that night. It shows a ring of officers standing by as Mr. Bernardez, shirtless, enters the hallway, slumps to the floor and begs to see his dog.
Eventually, the officers handcuff him behind his back as he writhes and screams about the dog, then bring him downstairs in an elevator. Seconds after they exit the building’s lobby, Mr. Bernardez scoops his bound wrists under his ankles to his front and sprints away into the night.
A long search follows, officers fanning out with their flashlights. A police helicopter hovers loudly overhead. It’s 5 a.m. Finally, they find him, in a parking lot ranting about the dog and about his sick mother, and load him into an ambulance.
He was held for a couple days for psychiatric observation, then released. When he emerged, his mother was on life support. Her other children had returned to New York to be with her. David Shelton, one of Selwyn’s brothers in North Carolina, was in their mother’s Bronx apartment one day when Selwyn arrived.
“He wasn’t in the right head space, ever since my mom fell ill,” Mr. Shelton recalled. His brother went to a closet and emerged with a samurai sword, a gift to their mother from a friend who’d brought it back from serving in the military overseas. She had given it to Selwyn on the condition that it not leave the apartment.
“I was like, ‘Dude, this is the last thing you need,’” Mr. Shelton said. “‘I just need you to think things through.’ He’s like, ‘No, no, I need it.’ He just ran out of the apartment.”
Roaming the city
He roamed the city in a drugged, manic daze — Times Square, Brooklyn, the Bronx — with the sword strapped to his back and his German shepherd, Loki, at his side. He felt powerful. He posted videos to Instagram with the sword. Other people posted videos of him.
He switched drugs. He smoked methamphetamine and took ketamine, a volatile cocktail known to produce hallucinations and delusions. He heard a message beamed directly into his skull: Carry that samurai sword everywhere. People won’t mess with you.
He wanted to take his mother’s pain. “I wanted to replace myself with my mom,” he said. “I wanted to take her place in being sick and going into the coma. I wanted to switch.”
His mother was taken off life support on Oct. 15 and died soon after.
Reeling, Mr. Bernardez left his apartment in Crown Heights on Oct. 20 with the sword on his back and boarded a train to Manhattan. Several stops later, a panhandler entered the car.
“He was acting very aggressively,” Mr. Bernardez recalled. “Making people get up, walk away. I’m just observing.”
The man drew closer, and Mr. Bernardez sprang at him, punching him. The two men grappled, until Mr. Bernardez remembered the sword on his back and pulled it from its sheath as the train pulled into the Chambers Street station.
The screams startled him. What were they afraid of? He ran away too, only then realizing that he was gripping the sword — that he was the thing these people feared.
He sheathed the sword. The man he had punched followed him, saying, “I’m going to get you arrested. They’ve got you on camera.”
Mr. Bernardez said he jogged to get away from him, but the man kept following. He climbed the stairs to street level and waited, and when he saw the man coming up the stairs, too, he struck him hard on top of the head with the sheathed sword.
The man retreated downstairs, bleeding. He was Larry K. Griffin II, 26, himself a subway character. Three years earlier, he had been arrested after placing two rice cookers in a subway station and one aboveground in Chelsea, triggering a morning-rush bomb scare. The cookers were later found to be harmless.
The attack left him bleeding but not seriously injured.
Mr. Bernardez ran all the way back home, over the Brooklyn Bridge. He spent a fitful night there, high on drugs. News of the attack spread quickly — even the mayor was talking about the subway ninja, dressed all in black in surveillance images released to the public.
“When you do an analysis of the subway crimes we are seeing, you are seeing it is driven by people with mental health issues,” Mayor Eric Adams said that day at a news conference. “If you got a ninja outfit on and you are running around with a sword, then something is wrong.”
Officers arrived at his door the following day. As they pounded on the door, Mr. Bernardez pulled his portable air-conditioner out of his 10th- floor window and crawled outside, lowering himself to the ninth floor. Then he jumped and landed, somehow, unharmed. Once again, the police were chasing him. And once again, they caught him a few hours later.
‘To give myself a shot’
Evelyn Bernardez’s family gathered for a funeral in the Bronx a week after her death. Selwyn was absent, held in jail on charges of felony assault.
“I’m not a doctor, but it was clear to me that he was very confused about what was going on in his own brain,” said his attorney, Gabriela Mejias with the New York County Defender Services. “He could not articulate what was happening, but he knew it was bad.”
As the drugs left his system and he underwent mental health examinations and treatment, his mood and orientation stabilized, she said. He had no meaningful criminal record — no arrests as an adult, and sealed cases as a juvenile some 10 years earlier.
Ms. Mejias began to compile his medical records with an eye toward presenting him as a candidate for an alternative-to-incarceration program. It would be an uphill battle — this was a high-profile subway assault, where prosecutors might be inclined to seek prison time.
She discovered the September episode, when he’d called the police on himself. That would actually play in his favor.
“It spoke to his awareness that something was happening to him that he didn’t understand and that he was scared beyond belief of,” she said.
Prosecutors agreed, and Mr. Bernardez was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor: disorderly conduct. In exchange, he entered into a one-year contract requiring regular drug testing and counseling. That ended last year.
“He just really threw himself 110 percent at it,” Ms. Mejias said.
He found work and volunteered with the Phoenix, a community that organizes sober events. That led to the personal-trainer job in Union Square. He takes acting classes on Sundays.
He said he found purpose in his recovery.
“I made a promise to my mother on her deathbed,” he said. “To give myself a shot.”
He still lives in Crown Heights, in the apartment he leaped from the day the police arrived in 2022. He doesn’t understand how he survived that fall without injury. The drugs, maybe.
And the sword? He keeps it in a closet. He thought about getting rid of the thing, but found he couldn’t.
It is an artifact from a dark time. More important, it was a gift from his mother.
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