World

The Fear Factor and Crime in New York

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll look at arrests in two high-profile cases — and how random crimes have added to the fear factor in New York. We’ll also get a first glimpse of a photograph of a man killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Mayor Eric Adams with Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington.Credit…Evan Vucci/Associated Press

First, the arrests. In shootings that killed two homeless men, one in New York and one in Washington, and wounded three others, a Washington man was taken into custody there after a two-day manhunt. Relatives and law enforcement officials identified him as Gerald Brevard III, 30. His aunt, Sheila Brevard, said he had been homeless on and off for years and had started showing signs of mental illness when he was in his 20s.

In the stabbings at the Museum of Modern Art, a suspect was arrested in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia police said Gary Cabana, 30, of Manhattan, was found sleeping on a bench at a Greyhound bus terminal. He is expected to face assault charges in New York after an extradition hearing.

And another case took on new ominousness. An 87-year-old vocal coach, Barbara Maier Gustern, died on Tuesday of injuries she suffered when a woman pushed her to the ground outside her Chelsea apartment building last week in what appeared to be a random attack.

The drumbeat of cases has some people saying “it’s like the 80s again,” or maybe the ’90s. But these crimes are different. The suspects were not trying to rob their victims. The victims were not caught in the crossfire when members of drug gangs settled scores.

The common threads appear to be two consequences of mental illness — rage and randomness.

“And randomness is the key variable that increases the fear in a lot of people,” said Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If I am an average citizen who just takes the subway, I have zero fear or risk of being a victim of a crime. Throw the randomness thing in, and everyone becomes a potential target or a potential victim. That’s what worries a lot of people.”

It is worrisome because such crimes are of the moment in the perpetrator’s head. That is different than crimes like robbery or auto theft.

Crime has risen during the pandemic. There 3,324 felony assault cases between Jan. 1 and March 6 — 614 more than during the same period last year — and there were 861 more robberies. The number of murders has remained roughly flat: There were 67 between Jan. 1 and March 6, compared with 66 a year ago.

Still, Herrmann says that crime remains “way below” what he called “the doom and gloom of the 1990s.” But the shootings of the homeless people, the stabbings at the Met and the assault on the vocal coach are not, he said, “easy-to-prevent crimes.”

The Continuing Aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks

  • 20th Anniversary: Two decades later, this single day continues to shape the U.S. and what it means to “never forget.”
  • 9/11 Photographs: We asked Times photographers to reflect on the images they captured from the attacks and their aftermath.
  • Effects on Survivors: Hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to toxic material in the attacks. Years later, they are still getting sick.
  • One Conspiracy’s Effect: A conspiracy film energized the “9/11 truther” movement. It also supplied the template for the current age of disinformation.

“It sounds like mental health is the thing that ties them all together,” he said. “The good news, the police are catching them rather quickly and consistently. The bad news, obviously, is they’ve already done their damage. This goes to the need to applaud the police in their work but also invest in more mental health resources.”


Weather

It’s another sunny day in the low 60s. At night, temps will drop to the high 40s.

alternate-side parking

In effect today. Suspended tomorrow (Purim).


‘Public was misled’ on nursing home deaths

An audit from the state comptroller said state health officials enabled former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to play down the number of virus-related nursing home deaths. The 41-page audit said the administration failed to account publicly for the deaths of about 4,100 people in nursing homes. It also said that Health Department officials at times underreported the death toll by as much as 50 percent from April 2020 to February 2021.

The audit said the Health Department often went along with the narrative that Cuomo promoted during the pandemic, sometimes failing “ethical” and “moral” imperatives to act transparently.

“The public was misled by those at the highest level of state government through distortion and suppression of the facts when New Yorkers deserved the truth,” Thomas DiNapoli, the comptroller, said in a statement.


The latest New York news

  • Andrey Muraviev, a Russian tycoon, was indicted on charges of making $1 million in illegal campaign donations to candidates in the United States to win support for a marijuana business.

  • New Jersey wants to dissolve a bistate agency set up during the “On the Waterfront” era to keep the mob off the docks. New York wants to keep it going.


Found, after some research: A 9/11 victim’s photo

Credit…Jin S. Lee, 9/11 Memorial and Museum

The place above Albert Ogletree’s name is no longer empty at the National September 11 Memorial Museum on the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. His photograph took its place there on Tuesday.

Ogletree was a food handler with Forte Food Service who was assigned to the cafeteria at Cantor Fitzgerald in the north tower when a jetliner slammed into the building on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He was one of 2,753 people killed in the twin towers that day — and one of only two whose portraits were missing from the gallery. In September 2016, when there were seven left to find, The New York Times published an article that prompted officials at the Department of Homeland Security to locate photographs of five of them.

Only photographs of Ogletree and a colleague from Forte Food, Antonio Dorsey Pratt, remained to be tracked down.

Jan Seidler Ramirez, an executive vice president of the museum and its chief curator, said the search for Ogletree had languished until the museum hired Grant Rodriguez Llera to work in its visitor services department, answering questions from people paying their respects. Llera had self-published a book — “Remember Me: The Passengers and Crew of Flight 93,” about passengers on the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania after they told relatives by cellphone that they planned to storm the cockpit. “So much of what is said about 9/11 leaves out the individual names and the individual stories, which I believe are deeply important,” he said.

So he offered to try to find a photograph of Ogletree.

“There wasn’t a lot to go on,” Llera said. The museum knew that he had been born on Christmas Day in 1951 and had grown up in Romulus, Mich., midway between Detroit and Ann Arbor. The museum also knew that he had moved to New York in the 1980s.

Llera discovered an obituary for Ogletree’s wife, who had died in 2004. It mentioned a daughter, whom he found on Facebook.

“He was a camera-shy man, she said,” Llera recalled, “and was living apart from the family in a rented room” in the fall of 2001. When Ogletree did not return home, “his personal belongings were disposed of by the landlord without contacting the family,” Llera added, “so if there were photos or personal effects of his, they were lost.”

Llera did a search on ancestry.com and found an old address for Ogletree in Romulus. “I decided to take a stab in the dark and contact the local high school,” Llera said. “I told them, based on Al’s date of birth, he would have attended school there in the early-to-mid-60s.” He asked if someone could look at the yearbook.

Ramirez was told that the school no longer had the yearbooks from that long ago, but was referred to Kathy Abdo, a former teacher who is now on the City Council, who knew where they had been stored and found the one with Ogletree’s picture. “The face is so sweet,” Ramirez said. “Life’s hardships have not etched themselves on that face.”


What we’re reading

  • Anna Sorokin, the fake German heiress who was the subject of the series “Inventing Anna,” faces deportation, but her lawyer is seeking a stay.

  • Fifty years ago this week, James Brown played for an audience of youths at an unlikely stage: Rikers Island. So how did the Godfather of Soul wind up playing there?


METROPOLITAN diary

Good boy

Dear Diary:

My boyfriend and I recently adopted a smallish 4-year-old mutt. His name is Kode, and he is a dream around people but unpredictably barky around other dogs, especially bigger ones.

When I walk Kode on Riverside Drive, I sometimes slink away when I see other dogs approaching, to avoid sneers from their owners and embarrassing confrontations.

On one recent rainy morning, I saw a young woman with two small dogs that seemed to be about the right size for Kode to get along with.

Before approaching, I gave the woman my spiel: “Kode is a shelter dog who doesn’t yet have the best social skills around his peers, even though, I believe, his intentions are good.”

She was understanding, and our interaction went smoothly. I thanked her for her patience and kindness. She pulled out a bag of lightly worn dog jackets. She said she was trying to give them away and asked if we might like one.

My little misfit walked away with one more normal social interaction under his belt and a pink rain poncho that fit him perfectly.

— Veronica Majerol

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.


Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Jeff Boda and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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