By Andy Newman, Jan Ransom and Chelsia Rose Marcius
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, Rivera went on a rampage, stabbing three people to death as he stalked across Manhattan, authorities say. He was indicted Friday on three counts of first-degree murder.
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.
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 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, Rivera, who was born in Puerto Rico, had 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 Rikers Island jail complex in New York City was interrupted by two stints in the psychiatric unit of the Bellevue Hospital prison ward, during one of which he assaulted a correction officer, according to court and Correction Department records.
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 U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., 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 Rivera’s case “a damning indictment of the failures of the criminal justice and mental health systems in New York City.”
Although the administration of New York Mayor Eric Adams has lowered the threshold for people in psychiatric crisis to be involuntarily taken to hospitals, 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 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 chronically homeless people suffering from mental illness and addiction.
The information about 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.
On Oct. 18, the day after he left jail, Rivera was arraigned in Manhattan 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 nonprofit Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, known as CASES, offered to put Rivera under one of its highest levels of supervision.
Under recent bail-reform laws in New York, the supervised release program, which launched in 2016, expanded to all defendants with pending criminal cases and, as a result, included a growing number of those with severe mental illness who required greater care than supervised release was designed to offer. The city this year launched a pilot program to test a new component of the supervised release program to reduce rearrests and cater to those with higher needs.
Rivera attended a CASES intake session after his arraignment, the two people familiar with the matter said. He met with a CASES worker in person Oct. 28 and again a week later, but he missed a third meeting Nov. 11, they said.
When a client goes missing, CASES typically conducts a “diligent search,” contacting friends and family and visiting places the person frequents. If the client cannot be located, CASES must notify the court within 21 days or at the next court date, whichever is soonest. That would have been Dec. 2 for Rivera. A CASES spokesperson declined to comment.
In October, when Rivera left jail, he was referred to an assessment shelter, where after a few days or weeks he could be sent to a 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, a surveillance camera captured video of Rivera donning a sweatshirt and a trenchcoat and stashing two knives in his sweatshirt pocket. On West 19th Street near 10th Avenue in Chelsea, he approached a construction worker, Angel Lata Landi, stabbed him fatally in the stomach and walked away, police said.
A 67-year-old man was fishing in the East River near 30th Street, and Rivera stabbed him to death too, police said. Twelve blocks north, after Rivera killed a 36-year-old woman near the United Nations, federal agents caught him and handed him to police.
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