Our city’s leaders — especially Mayor Adams — must fully commit to finding and treating the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living with serious mental illness. errollouis writes
“Pray for my family and remember her for the hero that she was,” said Russo-Elling’s daughter, Danielle Fuoco. “Because that’s truly who she was and she died doing what she loved.”
City leaders must now match the moment with the same kind of determination, savvy, and cold nerve that Russo-Elling and her colleagues display every day. That means fully committing to finding and treating the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living with serious mental illness. People like Zisopoulos, who reportedly had no prior arrests or criminal record but was hospitalized for observation in 2018 after sending disturbing texts to a friend.
And more recently, we saw the sickening video of Elizabeth Gomes being brutally beaten at a JFK AirTrain station, allegedly by, whose long arrest record includes beating his 82-year-old grandmother to death at age 14, stabbing his sister in the hand years later, and attacking workers at Creedmore Psychiatric Center in 2011.
For too long, seriously mentally ill people have cycled between jails, prisons, hospitals, subways, and the streets, with no one agency applying continuous, sustained attention until tragedy strikes. The Adams administration, to its credit, has vowed to end the game of bureaucratic musical chairs..