Pols rip ThriveNYC failure as ‘disaster’
An NYPD cop emerged Sunday from the medically induced coma he was placed in following a deadly melee with a unhinged suspect — as lawmakers said the incident is proof the city’s $250-million-a-year mental-health program is a waste.
Officer Lesley Lafontant, 53, sat up in his hospital bed, recognized people and started speaking, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
But the 21year NYPD veteran remained under intensive care and was receiving only a limited number of visitors at Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center in Brooklyn, according to the sources.
“He has a long road ahead of him,” one source said.
Lafontant was injured Friday when a T-shirt vendor with a history of mental illness bashed him in the face with a metal chair as the cop tried to handcuff a vagrant accused of urinating in a Brooklyn nail salon, police said.
Lafontant’s rookie partner fired a Taser that had no effect on assailant Kwesi Ashun, 33 — so Lafontant fired six shots, at least one of which struck Ashun in the head, killing him, police said.
Ashun’s sister has told The Post that he had bipolar disorder — but when she warned officials he was “spiraling” out of control just 11 days earlier, a city Health Department “mobile crisis team” from the city’s embattled ThriveNYC mentalhealth program determined he was not a threat to either himself or others.
“Even when all the signs of mental illness are there, and the family of this individual is begging for help, ThriveNYC once again fails,” Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens) said.
Councilman Joe Borelli (R-SI) said it was time to pull the plug on the mental-health program.
“The time for polite criticism is over,” he said. “ThriveNYC is an unmitigated disaster and the city needs an entirely new approach to violent mental illness.”
City Hall and ThriveNYC would only say that a “full investigation into this incident” was underway.