Bloody insanity
Another day, another dangerously deranged person left to his own devices on the streets of New York City, and another New Yorker seriously hurt. This time, the perpetrator was a 28-year-old man with long histories both of mental illness and of violence, let loose recently in random knifings.
Out of the blue last Saturday, Francis Salud attacked Anthony Christopher-Smith, a Newark social worker in the East Village for dinner with friends. Salud pushed Christoper-Smith against a wall and began slashing.
The 30-year-old needed eight hours of surgery to save nerves in his face and 150 stitches to close a six-inch gash from his right ear to his mouth.
At Salud’s arraignment, a Manhattan assistant district attorney described him as “a danger to quite literally anyone he happens to pass on the street.”
Yet the danger was on the street because New York’s mental health system persistently fails to prevent hundreds of the most deranged individuals from hurting themselves and those around them.
Far too concerned with the rights of the mentally ill to live as they please, psychiatric professionals have abdicated to the criminal justice system.
As a result, prosecutors, judges and jail wardens flail about because they are not geared to deal with deep psychoses, while cops are called in to stem damage after it has been done.
Salud was arrested in a similar slashing in October. Typically, a judge released him on bail — despite an extensive criminal record that “involves weapons,” said the DA’s office in the course of now securing Salud’s incarceration.
Police had tracked Salud down after comparing footage of Christopher-Smith’s assault with that of earlier random slashings. They confirmed he was the attacker when they found an entry in his day planner, stating, “did a buck fifty” (as in a slice that would take that many stitches to close) “on somebody near Third Ave.”
Cops are researching what other acts of random violence he may have perpetrated. As to unraveling his contacts with psychiatrists, forget it. Privacy laws make everyone in the mental health system unaccountable for their perilous actions. There is nothing exceptional about Salud. The Daily News Editorial Board attempts to track such acts of violence by the mentally ill, including cases in which cops had to use force to control someone. Incidents occur regularly.
Just two weeks ago, a schizophrenic named Kari Bazemore slashed without warning a young woman in Chelsea. After Bazemore’s arrest, police determined that a few days earlier he had randomly slashed a woman in the Bronx. A week earlier, cops had arrested him for sucker-punching a stranger.
As should have been expected, a judge had released Bazemore for that attack despite his violent record and despite a warning by evaluators that he was a bad risk for bail.
Completing a tragically familiar picture: Bazemore’s family said they had repeatedly sought mental health treatment for him, but were rebuffed.
Their story is absolutely credible. Fully twothirds of patients discharged from the city’s hospital psychiatric wards go without follow up care — an absurdity when Mayor de Blasio has made a sweeping mental-health agenda a centerpiece of his tenure. His promised new program to track and treat the dangerously deranged exists only as a modest line in a just-proposed budget.
For too many years, this page has been adding new names to the too long list of New Yorkers who have paid the price for the mental health community’s grave reluctance to invoke Kendra’s Law, which lets officials compel dangerous mentally ill patients to take medication or be committed.
If the definition of insanity is to do the same thing again and again and expect different results, New York’s treatment of the dangerously mentally ill qualifies.