Years before Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless man, was murdered on the subway, the city had his eye on him.
He was on a list known informally as the Top 50, a list of people in a city of eight million who are notable for the severity of their problems and their resistance to accepting aid. The list is overseen by a task force of social service workers and nonprofits; when street workers see someone on the subway who is on the list, they should notify the city and try to take that person to a shelter.
Despite that, and an open warrant for his arrest, Mr. Neely was out alone on May 1 when he began ranting at passengers. A Marine veteran, Daniel Penny, grabbed him and strangled him to death; Mr. Penny is now charged with manslaughter.
In the wake of Mr Neely’s death, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has been criticized by homeless advocates and left-wing political opponents who say the killing highlights deep problems in the city’s support systems for the homeless and those with mental illness. condition.
At a press conference on Thursday, citing Mr Neely’s presence on the list, Councilor Pierina Sanchez said: “Our city knew exactly who Jordan was, where he was and what his history was. And yet we let him down.”
But as officials put it, the task force and the Top 50 list were formed precisely for the very people who had failed the system time and time again. The death of 30-year-old Mr. Neely, who had been homeless for years, also demonstrates the limits of the tools at the task force’s disposal and the difficulty of keeping an eye on, let alone, people who are transient and elusive. make them accept help.
In a speech this week, Mr Adams called the list-keeping group “the guiding force” behind the city’s efforts to help people like Mr Neely “stabilize and heal from the ravages of homelessness and long-term, untreated psychosis .”
The purpose of the list is to connect disparate bureaucracies in a sprawling city, in which a group of people with intense needs have regular contact with hospital workers, street workers and police officers who do not interact regularly.
The people on the list are among the city’s “most entrenched and chronic sufferers,” the mayor’s senior adviser on serious mental illness Brian Stettin said in an interview, and are discussed at weekly meetings of the task force.
The group that maintains the list, formally known as the Coordinated Behavioral Health Task Force, is made up of employees from across the city government, including the Departments of Health, the Homeless, and Hospitals, along with representatives from the nonprofits the city contracts with to try to connect homeless people with shelters and services, a process known as outreach.
At the weekly meetings, Mr Stettin said, task force members exchange updates on the people on the list – “what their current needs appear to be” and in some cases “how their circumstances have changed to the point where we need to start thinking about different ways we can approach their cases.”
Top 50 is a bit of a misnomer. There is no fixed number of people on the list and there are actually two lists: one for people who usually stay in the subway and one for people who stay on the street. People can be taken off the list for a variety of reasons, including moving into housing or going to jail.
According to an employee of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a group that has the city contract to do subway outreach, Mr. Neely was on the subway list.
Subway responders would be familiar with all the names on the subway list, said the Bowery Residents’ Committee official, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
If they come across someone on it, the employee said, they should notify the homeless services department, which can arrange transportation to a type of shelter known as a safe haven. Safe havens have fewer rules and restrictions than barrack-type group shelters and are often more attractive to homeless people who usually avoid shelters.
For people on the street version of the list, which included about 65 people in early May, being on it can get someone desperately needed faster, said Juan Rivera, the outreach director for BronxWorks, which has the city contract to do street outreach. in the Bronx.
Mr. Rivera described a man staying in a BronxWorks safe haven, furiously smashed some windows and took to the streets. BronxWorks had added him to the Top 50 list, allowing him to jump on the waiting list to become a client of a street team of clinicians known as an Intensive Mobile Treatment team.
Working with the mobile treatment team, the man regained stability and moved into permanent housing, Mr Rivera said.
“He is still connected to his team and he is doing very well,” he said.
As for Mr. Neely, he had been a fixture in the subway system for years – first in his teens and twenties as a gifted Michael Jackson impersonator who mesmerized commuters with his fluid moonwalking, and later, when he spiraled into mental illness and substance abuse. , as a slovenly and sporadically violent man who was repeatedly arrested and taken to hospitals. Mr Neely was on the list in 2019 when it was launched and remained on it until his death, according to the Bowery Residents’ Committee staff member.
In February, Mr Neely, who had been jailed on assault charges for beating a 67-year-old woman and breaking several bones in her face, was released from a residential treatment program under a plea deal signed by required him to avoid problems for 15 months, stay on antipsychotic medication, and not abuse drugs.
Two weeks later, he walked out of the facility and did not return, and the warrant was issued.
In March, Mr. Neely approached by homeless workers at a Manhattan subway station. Smartly dressed and calm, he accepted a ride to a shelter in the Bronx where he spent the night, according to outreach data shared with DailyExpertNews.
But on April 8, when street workers found him at a station at the end of the line in Coney Island, Mr. Neely, dressed in dirty clothes riddled with burn holes, exposed himself and urinated on a subway train, according to the shared notes. with The Times.
Emergency responders, whose job it is to gain the trust of people trying to avoid contact with authorities, usually don’t check for search warrants, but they summon the police, who removed him from the station.
Apparently the police were not aware of the order either. A program launched in 2019 that saw police justify checks on people caught violating transport system rules was halted during the pandemic following criticism that it would criminalize homelessness.
The Coney Island workers didn’t learn until the next day that the person they had met was a man on the Top 50 list, the case notes show.
A note later submitted by an outreach worker about the encounter prophetically reads: “Because of the client’s aggressive behavior, he may harm others or himself if left untreated and assessed by a mental health professional.”
According to a directive issued by Mr Adams last autumn, people who are in such a serious state of psychological crisis as to pose a danger to themselves or others are supposed to be taken to a hospital for examination, involuntarily if necessary.
Outreach teams at the end of the line usually consist of nurses who work for the city and are trained to conduct field assessments of people and get them transported to hospitals. Outreach notes do not indicate whether a nurse evaluated Mr. Neely at Coney Island.
Mr. Neely had been involuntarily hospitalized in the past, but does not appear to have been in the final months of his life.
Lauren McCarthy reporting contributed.