On Nov. 11, a 51-year-old homeless man named Ramon Rivera who had been charged with stealing a $1,500 acrylic bowl from a fancy furniture store in Manhattan had a court-ordered appointment scheduled with his case manager.
He did not show up, according to two people familiar with the matter.
A week later, Mr. Rivera went on a rampage, randomly stabbing three people to death as he stalked across Manhattan, the authorities say. He was indicted Friday on three counts of first-degree murder.
Mr. Rivera’s apparent descent into homicidal madness shows the difficulty that the medical and legal systems have in keeping track of some of the city’s least stable people and ensuring they stay connected to care.
Mr. Rivera, who had a lengthy, if modest, criminal history and who legal documents say suffers from schizophrenia, had been in a court program called “supervised release” that is designed only to make sure that a defendant shows up for court appearances. He was required to attend two in-person sessions with a case manager, complete two phone check-ins and go to therapy in the first month. That schedule was one of the strictest available under the supervised release program.
When Mr. Rivera was released from jail last month after serving nine months for theft, he was referred to the city’s homeless shelter system. Over the next month, he spent only three nights in a shelter, according to someone familiar with his social service records.
Before he arrived in New York last year, Mr. Rivera lived in Florida and Ohio and had a criminal record that included at least two assault charges, one of which led to a 28-day stay at a psychiatric hospital. His recent sentence at the city’s Rikers Island jail complex was interrupted by two stints in the psychiatric unit of the Bellevue Hospital prison ward. During one of those stints, he assaulted a correction officer, according to records from the city’s Correction Department.
When he pleaded guilty to the assault in September, his lawyer told a judge that his client was only partly coherent.
On Wednesday, 11 federal, state and city legislators, including Representative Jerrold Nadler, who represent the districts where the murders occurred, wrote to the heads of several city agencies demanding accountability.
“What information was communicated between the Department of Correction, Health + Hospitals and Department of Homeless Services upon Mr. Rivera’s release from Rikers Island?” they asked, calling Mr. Rivera’s case “a damning indictment of the failures of the criminal justice and mental health systems in New York City.”
Similar cries for reform have often been heard after random attacks in the city. Sometimes they have led to new programs, laws and criteria for identifying those who may be prone to lashing out. But no structure could ever be created that is comprehensive enough to be foolproof.
While the administration of Mayor Eric Adams has lowered the threshold for people in psychiatric crisis to be involuntarily brought to a hospital, someone with severe mental illness cannot be held indefinitely once stabilized. A New York Times investigation last year found that hospitals often released patients before they were stabilized or without proper discharge planning.
Under Mayor Adams, the city has sent officers and nurses into the subways in search of people in mental distress. It has financed thousands of “supportive housing” apartments, with on-site social services, for people who are chronically homeless and suffering from addiction or mental illness.
On Thursday, Mr. Adams called, yet again, for “stronger laws that allow what’s called involuntary removal.”
“People who are in danger to themselves and in danger to others, we need to be able to take the action to involuntarily move them off the streets,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of pushback and a lot of fight against that on every level of government.”
The information about Mr. Rivera that exists in the public record is bleak.
It includes nearly two dozen criminal charges, along with a litany of traffic infractions. Municipal court dockets from Florida from the early 2000s include citations for battery, “unknowingly” driving with a suspended license and offering an undercover officer posing as a prostitute $40 for sex.
In 2009 in Florida, he was convicted of driving while under the influence. The case file includes a handwritten letter to the judge.
“I am financially unable to pay the fines, for I am homeless and without any income or assets whatsoever,” Mr. Rivera wrote. “I am putting myself at your disposition and will be very happy to perform any task that your authority may assign to me.”
Mr. Rivera moved to Ohio in the early 2010s. In the summer of 2018, a volunteer at the Open Shelter in Columbus was about to serve food to the homeless people there when Mr. Rivera, whom he had never met, stormed up the stairs. He did not say a word. Instead, the volunteer, Jerome Jackson, recalled this week, “He snapped on me. He blew past everybody and pushed me into the wall.”
The shelter director, Sheli Mathias, said the attack had left a big hole in the wall. “It struck all of us that this was somebody who had a severe mental health problem,” she said. After Mr. Rivera pleaded guilty to the assault, he spent 28 days at a psychiatric facility, his lawyer, Thomas F. Hayes, said.
Others who crossed paths with Mr. Rivera in Ohio recalled him as peaceable. Solomon Dean, a deputy director at Open Shelter, said he would come in, “get some food and sit in a corner and keep to himself.”
On June 22, 2023, Mr. Rivera tried to cash bad checks in two Ohio towns 25 miles apart, Grove City and Circleville, according to their police departments, both of which issued arrest warrants.
By November, Mr. Rivera was in New York, where the police found him on the sidewalk in Flushing, Queens, acting erratically and saying his arm hurt, according to internal police records. A few weeks later, he was taken to a Brooklyn hospital after saying he felt suicidal and homicidal, according to the records.
In December, according to the records, Mr. Rivera embarked on a theft spree: the $1,500 bowl in SoHo, steaks from a Bronx supermarket, $7,000 worth of vapes and cigarettes from a Manhattan bodega, cellphones in Union City, N.J., and CBD buds from a cannabis dispensary in Hoboken.
He was indicted the next month on burglary and related offenses and then sent to Rikers. He pleaded guilty in August.
On Oct. 18, the day after he got out of jail, Mr. Rivera was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on the theft of the bowl. It was a misdemeanor, which meant he couldn’t be held on bail, but a prosecutor requested supervised release.
A representative from the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, a nonprofit known as CASES, offered to put Mr. Rivera under one of its highest levels of supervision.
The judge, Kacie Lally, noted that Mr. Rivera had failed to appear six times for prior cases and told Mr. Rivera that the supervision was “reasonably necessary to assure your return to court on your court dates.”
“We do not want to set you up for failure,” Judge Lally told him, “but we do want to connect you with services and to make sure that you’re coming to court.” She scheduled his next appearance for Dec. 4.
Mr. Rivera attended an intake session at CASES after his arraignment, according to the two people familiar with the matter. He met with a CASES worker in person on Oct. 28, and again a week later, the people said. But he missed a third meeting on Nov. 11, they said.
When a client goes missing, CASES typically conducts a “diligent search” that includes contacting friends and family and visiting places the person frequents. If the client cannot be located, the organization must notify the court within 21 days or at the next court date, whichever is soonest. That would have been Dec. 2 for Mr. Rivera. A CASES spokesman declined to comment.
In October, when Mr. Rivera got out of jail, he was referred to an assessment shelter, where after a few days or weeks he could be sent to a specialized shelter for people with mental illness and addiction. But he spent only three nights at an assessment shelter in Brooklyn and left the system, the person familiar with his social service records said.
Early Monday morning, a surveillance camera captured video of Mr. Rivera donning a sweatshirt, a trench coat and a hat, and stashing two knives in his sweatshirt pocket. On West 19th Street near 10th Avenue in Chelsea just before 8:30 a.m., he walked up to a construction worker, Angel Lata Landi, stabbed him fatally in the stomach and walked away, the police said.
About two hours later, a 67-year-old man was fishing in the East River near 30th Street, and Mr. Rivera stabbed him to death too, the police said. Twelve blocks north, after Mr. Rivera stabbed a 36-year-old woman near the United Nations, federal agents caught him and turned him over to the police.
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