“He was just so warm and kind and sweet,” she recalled later. She heard the man approach the front desk of her office, and she realized that he was her new client. When the elevator arrived at 20, both of them got out. “He complimented my dress, and we had this engaging back and forth.” “We bonded over the weather, but it was not small talk,” Ms. She had just been assigned a new client with an unusual case.īefore the elevator doors shut, a tall, older man, 70 and wearing thick eyeglasses, darted inside. But three years in, she felt invigorated by the work. She was a lawyer with the New York County Defender Services, a churning and grinding job that can make idealistic young people cynical and exhausted. Vickie Mwitanti walked into her office building near the criminal courthouse on Lower Manhattan’s Centre Street in June and entered the elevator, pushing the button for the 20th floor. He knows it’s wrong, and he apologizes to the judge, but he won’t stop. One man with a cellphone has created enough havoc to be hauled over and over into court, but not enough to warrant a prison cell. A vein of behavior outside the norms runs through the streets, not easily addressed by handcuffs or medication. This tension feels immediate in New York City, where people returning to their offices after months at home are facing reminders of some of the most visible ways mental illness manifests itself on subway platforms or street corners. It is one that plays out all over New York when the city’s law enforcement apparatus is confronted with people whose behavior is erratic or delusional, but who do not seem to pose any real danger to others. His remarkable case is an extreme example of a familiar dynamic. The police found the phone on the 14th floor, and with it, the man behind every call.Īnd so the mystery became a puzzle - one that has confounded an entire team of lawyers, caregivers and social workers. Who was making them? Why? Was it a coordinated attempt to disrupt the police, or an epic, yearslong prank?ĭetectives eventually traced the calls to a single cellphone in a building on West 43rd Street that had once been the Hotel Times Square, but for years has offered affordable housing and counseling to vulnerable men and women in the city. The calls had been treated like emergencies now they were a mystery. The police, over time, stopped responding to the calls at all. Firefighters and paramedics met them there.īut the responses all ended the same way: The emergency vehicles turned and left, their sirens off. It was the location of thousands of 911 calls going back more than two years - without question, the most dangerous address in all of New York City by this measure.Īgain and again, police officers had raced to the tree-lined block of the Upper West Side, between West 103rd and 104th Streets. Fights, stabbings, sexual assaults, shots fired - all at 312 Riverside Drive. 16, was the first of five that day reporting dire emergencies at that same address. The dispatcher asked follow-up questions and assured the man: “Help is on the way.” She’s buck naked and she’s mentally ill and she’s cutting herself with a razor.” “The lady in Room 340 on the third floor is cutting herself. “I need police - 312 Riverside Drive,” the caller said in a hushed voice. “New York City 911,” the emergency dispatcher answered.
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