Cops say the alleged Chinatown attacker, Alexander Wright, lives in a homeless shelter and was arrested four times in the last year for similar random assaults. And he’s only the latest in a long line of dangerously troubled people that the city can’t or won’t treat.
Refusing to confront this mental-health crisis may be the worst failure of the de Blasio mayoralty.
The pattern is all too familiar to New Yorkers: The perpetrator is usually an unstable homeless person with an escalating history of bizarre, dangerous behaviors. Here’s a partial list of the horrors:
- Last Friday, another homeless man allegedly pushed another Asian woman, 65, down a flight of stairs at a Midtown subway station. The suspect (John Chappell, 64) was busted last December in the unprovoked assault of woman waiting for the R at the Herald Square station. He had 77 prior arrests then but got a simple desk-appearance ticket.
- In January, a deranged man shoved a commuter into a moving train at the Lexington Avenue/59th Street station.
- Just two weeks in February saw more than a dozen attacks, including a number of subway slashings, a Bronx woman shoved onto the tracks and a bus operator struck with a 2-by-4.
- In early May, a Harlem man was shoved to the tracks in an unprovoked attack at the 135th Street/Lenox Avenue subway station.
- On May 23, four people, including a cop, were attacked in two separate incidents — where one attacker wielded a hammer and the other had to be sedated — in the subway.
- A few days later, a mumbling vagrant shoved a 36-year-old Asian man in front of an oncoming F train in Queens.
Yet Mayor Comrade Bill de Blasio
...cryptocommie mayor of New York and for some reason a Dem candidate for president in 2020. Corrupt and incompetent, his qualifications for office seem to consist of being married to a black woman, with whom he honeymooned in Cuba. He has a preppy-looking son named Dante, whose Divine Comedy involved getting his back hair up when a police car drove past him slowly. New Yorkers voted for him, so they deserve him...continues to turn a blind eye to the problem. Asked last October how he planned to address the city’s mentally ill homeless problem, the mayor droned on about New Yorkers disturbed during the pandemic turning to his wife’s scattershot $1.25 billion ThriveNYC program — which focuses not on this kind of issue, but on lesser issues such as depression.