Ken Murray/DAILY NEWS
Times Square crazyman Glenn Broadnax caused a shooting, but can the law do anything about it?
Three deranged men wreaked bloody mayhem in the city over the course of less than a month, killing one New Yorker, stabbing or slashing five and forcing a Times Square police shooting that wounded two.
Oh, well. Some mentally ill people become dangerous. Live with it, or die, as the case may be.
No. The violent outbursts of Martin Redrick, Glenn Brodnax and Julius James Graham stand as a clarion call to mental health authorities to take tighter control of the care provided to the disturbed — including forced medication under the state’s Kendra’s Law.
Cases such as these come and go in New York as if they are the unavoidable byproduct of mental illness. That’s simply wrong.
Typically, the police are called in, posing perils to the officers, bystanders and the ill. Cops make an arrest and classify the individual as an “EDP” or emotionally disturbed person.
The courts take over. The subject is sent for psychiatric evaluation and disappears into a closed world, likely ending in incarceration. And there the matter ends.
Because of excessive privacy laws, no one with any power is privy to the individual’s psychiatric history, including whether a fractured mental health system treated him or her appropriately.
Had the individual stopped taking prescribed calming medications? No one knows. Was the individual supposed to be under supervision? No one will say.
Graham uses a scissor blade to injure five people in Riverside Park. He is then known only as a Harlem homeless shelter resident who came here from Texas.
Brodnax baits police into shooting him in Times Square. The cops get pilloried for wounding two people, and prosecutors offer the slightest hint at his background. Brodnax “has a history of mental illness reported by his family,” an assistant district attorney said at his court appearance.
Redrick yells, “I’m going to punch the first white man I see,” in Union Square and belts 62-year-old Jeffrey Babbitt, who falls, strikes his head and suffers a fatal injury. More of Redrick’s history emerges and illustrates the wide cracks through which the mentally ill can fall.
In 1997, Redrick pleaded guilty to assault in upstate Newburgh and was sentenced to six months in jail and five years’ probation. He violated probation and got 16 months in prison.
After he was released, he lived on the streets of Newburgh and had at least 20 run-ins with police. He was arrested twice in 2002 for throwing bottles near cops and punching an officer in the face. A shoplifting arrest in 2004 landed Redrick in Middletown Psychiatric Center with a schizophrenia diagnosis.
Regardless, Redrick was let go, came to the city and got busted for marijuana possession and for hitting a woman and spitting in her face. For a time, he lived in supported housing for the mentally ill, from which he was free to come and go.
There’s little doubt that the mental health system failed Redrick, and likely Brodnax and Graham as well. One man is dead and seven are injured — and, under the shroud of secrecy, no one will be held to account. So the violence will go on.
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=15093
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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