Just before noon last Saturday, a 9-year-old girl was with her mother at Grand Central Terminal when a man strode up to the child and, without warning, punched her in the face, according to the police. The child, dizzy and in pain, was taken to the hospital. Jean Carlos Zarzuela, 30, a man who had […]
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In September 1958, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed with a seven-inch steel letter opener. He had been autographing copies of his first book in Blumstein’s department store in Harlem. The woman who stabbed him was named Izola Ware Curry. When Dr. King found out she was schizophrenic, he harbored no ill […]
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There is an unfinished wooden dollhouse sitting in the attic of Janna Volz’s mother’s house that her father made for her 8th birthday. It has sat unvarnished for almost two decades, gathering dust. But this year, for her 26th birthday, she had planned to finally paint it with her father, now that he was sober. […]
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Before Carlton McPherson was accused of fatally shoving a stranger in front of a subway train last week, he was placed by New York City into specialized homeless shelters meant to help people with severe mental illness. But at one shelter, in Brooklyn, he became erratic and attacked a security guard. At another, he jumped […]
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The last breakdown of Marcus Gomez began in full view of the people whose job it was to stop it. First, Mr. Gomez, a slight 45-year-old who was homeless and had long lived with schizophrenia, started hearing voices. Then he stripped off his clothes and stalked naked through the halls of his transitional housing program. […]
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