We can be guardian angels to vulnerable neighbors

There’s an elderly gentleman in my community who is known by most of the gas station attendants, baristas and store managers as “Ray.”

If you drive along any of the streets within about a threemile radius of my house, you’d know Ray if you saw him: He’s a tall, gray-haired man who walks up and down the road — rain or shine, freezing cold or sizzling hot — swinging his arms, lurching and mumbling to himself.

My family and I always keep an eye out for him, sometimes intervening when he alarms someone who has not come into contact with him before. We’ll say, “His name is Ray, he’s not violent,” as the person behind the counter at the local Starbucks prepares him a complimentary coffee.

Generally, Ray is a gentle person, though sometimes he gets lost in his own thoughts and raises his voice. He is clean and always dressed appropriately for the weather, indicating that he is well taken care of at home, even if they can’t supervise him all the time.

I’ve called around to the police stations in the surrounding area, and they all know Ray. Still, I worry about Ray. He jumped to mind when I learned about the recent shooting death of 34-yearold Saheed Vassell.

Like Ray, Vassell was a community fixture in Brooklyn, where he was widely known to the residents of his neighborhood as having mental illness but being harmless. Residents who spoke to the New York Times said Vassell, like Ray, “had a penchant for picking things up off the street — cigarette lighters, empty bottles and other curbside flotsam — and playing with them like toys.”

John Fuller, who lived nearby, told the Times, “Every cop in this neighborhood knows him.” Even though many people in the area knew Vassell, he was fatally shot one night by four officers who were not from the local precinct and who, presumably, were not familiar with Vassell’s story.

Indeed, the officers were responding to multiple reports of a man thrusting a metal object that looked like a gun into the faces of several people — including a woman holding the hand of her child. Vassell was shot when he took a two-handed shooting stance at police officers responding to calls to 911. It turned out he was aiming a bent metal pipe with a silver knob, an implement that could easily have been misconstrued as a gun by passersby as well as law enforcement.

While, to some, this tragic incident might fit neatly into a pattern of national headlines about black men who are senselessly killed by police, there is another story here.

It’s the story of community members who are less connected than ever before, about the terrible shortage of mental health services in neighborhoods that need them the most, and the story of people with profound needs falling through the cracks.

There are many lessons to take from Vassell’s untimely death — not least of which is that our law enforcement officers need far more training in how to respond to situations involving people with mental illness. An important takeaway is the need to raise awareness about our own neighbors who might be in similar situations.

If there’s someone in your neighborhood who’s known to have issues, touch base with his or her family if possible. If there is a local website where neighbors post community news, it doesn’t hurt to put up an alert so others can become familiarized with a person who might be spotted acting erratically. Keep your eyes open for vulnerable people who need a guardian angel, and help your neighbors do the same.

These are tiny things, really, but in a world where so much is out of our control, let’s just try to take care of each other as best we can.