Kendra Webdale’s ghost
Somebody could and should have aided teen Edward Cordero well before he punched senior citizen Jacinto Suarez onto the tracks of a Brooklyn R train station, precipitating a fatal heart attack. Make that many somebodies. At city-run Bellevue Hospital, where Cordero’s family says he stayed when his bipolar disorder and schizophrenia flared, only to be released.
At the NYPD, through no fault of its own illequipped to be social worker or psychologist, which responded to violent domestic disturbances at a household his sister says he was supposed to be barred from, and arrested Cordero twice in two days for fare-beating before judges freed him.
At the Administration for Children’s Services, which his family says stepped in before he turned 18 sometime last year.
Someone, anyone, to ensure that Cordero, ranting about the devil and lashing out at those near, resumed his prescribed psychiatric medication with the power to keep his demons in check.
It is both a tragic coincidence and a cry for redoubled action that this underground tragedy exploded on the 19th anniversary to the day of when a ragingly schizophrenic man named Andrew Goldstein shoved a woman named Kendra Webdale into the path of an N train.
Like Cordero, Goldstein had been prescribed medication by doctors certain that drugs were necessary to calm his tortured mind.
Like Cordero, Goldstein had failed to take the drugs — and asserted he was out of his mind when he murdered Webdale.
Webdale’s murder shocked New York into action. By the following year, Kendra’s Law empowered officials to seek a court order for outpatient medical treatment wherever an individual’s refusal put themselves or others at risk of harm.
The law has saved lives both of men and women careening toward violent insanity and those whose lives they might have scarred or ended.
To their credit — and in line with city First Lady Chirlane McCray’s commendable focus on aiding New Yorkers with mental illness — city health authorities have in recent years obtained Kendra’s Law orders on far more patients than ever before.
But are they aggressive enough? Behind the shield of health privacy laws, it’s almost impossible to know.
At 18, with violence boiling, with police at the door, Cordero would appear to have been a prime candidate for a Kendra’s Law order, if not longerterm institutionalization. In cases of clear danger, judges almost always say yes.
Which means that either he was under a medication order unenforced — or stranded without support as he crossed a turbulent threshold to adulthood. Neither is remotely acceptable.
It is a relentless talking point for McCray that her Thrive NYC outreach catches serious mental illness early enough in life to redirect course, even for severe diagnoses like schizophrenia.
But that’s true only if treatment follows. Sometimes, serious treatment — with teeth to ensure that pills are swallowed.