The Never-Ending Story
How homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, and murder all find their way onto NYC's subway tracks
One night while laying on my couch I received a message from a friend saying that someone was just hit by a subway, followed by three photos that I will never forget. Police on the scene were assigned the grim task of collecting the man’s body parts off of the train tracks. The first photo showed a severed head being placed in a black bag with the man’s face frozen in a permanent state of terror. The second photo showed his naked torso being collected, and the third was a lost limb. You’re just going to have to trust me when I say that I’m doing you all a favor by not sharing them.
I began to wonder how often this happens, so I took it upon myself to comb through the MTA’s Twitter feed and created a spreadsheet of how many times someone was “struck by a subway” in 2022.
The total was 191 separate incidents including a disturbing number of days where more than one person was struck by a subway (on December 12th there were 4 separate incidents). I then searched the internet for recent stories on the subject and found none. What is going on here? Are 191 humans getting hit by subways in a single year not worth discussing?
A recent report from NYC.GOV shows that despite tough times, suicides have remained consistent with pre-pandemic numbers, indicating that these are not likely suicides. 29 people (that we know of) were reportedly pushed in front of subways in 2022, and a small percentage of the 191 who were struck by subways did in fact make the fatal mistake of climbing down onto the subway tracks because they dropped something. So what accounts for the rest?
When you take into consideration how many people we see living in the subway system that clearly can’t take care of themselves because they are on drugs, homeless, and struggling with some form of psychosis, there can only be one logical conclusion.
In other cases, the person may have been pushed to their death, but without sufficient video cameras or a witness present to verify the facts.
This tragic scenario now happens less than every 48 hours in NYC, and unfortunately, whenever someone dies at a subway station for reasons that remain unknown, the people in their lives are never able to get closure.
“You can’t understand it a year later. Not 3 years later. I don’t know when it will make sense. It was the day after Christmas 2020 and the phone rang. My next-door neighbor was frantic. I figured someone had blocked his driveway. Nothing I couldn’t fix. The words that followed once he calmed down haunt me to this day. Sedrick Simon, a man I grew up with, had been hit by the Q train. Sedrick lived 3 doors down from me my entire life.
We went to the same elementary school. We both attended Midwood High School. We still hung out during the summers when I’d barbeque. If he saw me in the yard he’d be quick to stop by. Jovial was the best word to describe Sedrick. Always a smile on his face and I can’t recall him ever talking badly about anyone. Sedrick was a gentle giant. So the news made no sense to me.
I automatically thought accident or murder, were the only two possibilities. Jumping was just something I couldn’t imagine he’d do. The police and the press, on the other hand, had a completely different narrative. They were leaning toward suicide. It didn’t make any sense, who gets up at 5am, gets dressed for work, and then jumps?
No cameras were installed in the Newkirk Plaza Station. No witnesses. No suicide note. No behavior was observed by neighbors that would indicate anything was awry. At best their guess was as good as mine. And it seems like we’ll never know the answer.”
A lot of the pain and unnecessary confusion surrounding Sedrick’s death could have been prevented had there been functional video cameras at every local subway stop. If monitored correctly by a local precinct, maybe NYC could reduce such incidents by intervening before they happen. In May of 2022, NY state eventually passed a bill mandating cameras at all subway platforms and even named the bill after Sedrick Simon himself. Unfortunately, it fell short of achieving its goals because 2,000 cameras aren’t enough to cover 472 subway stations effectively, leaving many of last year’s 191 subway incidents a mystery.
To no one’s surprise, local progressive politicians have said nothing about the number of people who were struck by subways, yet regularly attend protests about the 19 deaths that occurred last year on Rikers Island. There was even a Rikers Island death tracker launched last year by the NYTimes to create more outrage despite the fact that 6 were suicides, 5 were overdoses, and 4 were health-related. Yet any way you look at it, these incidents outnumber Rikers Island deaths by 10-1, making this issue a much bigger problem for the city as a whole.
It’s disappointing (but not surprising) to learn that NYC politicians are unable to effectively prioritize the 191 people struck by subways, let alone acknowledge that the amount of tragedy surrounding these incidents is far worse and affects a lot more people than someone dying alone in a jail cell on Rikers Island.
Every single time someone is hit by the subway it impacts the lives of countless MTA workers and any and all witnesses. That means parents, children, working-class commuters, and of course the first responders who have the daunting task of scraping body parts off of the subway tracks every time an incident occurs. There’s also the rippling effect that these incidents have on our economy, causing our entire economic engine to slow, making thousands late for work.
Rikers Island deaths are surely a tragedy that affects the few, but subway deaths are undoubtedly a tragedy that affects the many. It’s not very hard to understand.
How exactly did we get to this place where so many people with severe mental illness live in our subway system? This report from Stephen Eide explains:
-In 2010 the NY Dept of Health restructured Medicaid to incentivize hospitals to reduce lengths of stays for psych patients. The more days they stayed hospitalized, the less medicaid would reimburse that hospital for care.
-Andrew Cuomo reduced the number of psychiatric beds in NY State from 10,200 to 9,100
-During 2015–17, the number of seriously mentally ill homeless New Yorkers increased by about 2,200 (22%).
Yes, you read that right.
The number of homeless people with severe mental illness is (and has always been) a growing number because one can become mentally ill at any time, it isn’t just something people are born with. The next logical question is how do people who were once mentally stable become mentally ill?
Well, for starters, enabling drug addiction doesn’t help:
-Up to 10% of people who use cannabis will experience psychotic symptoms. Places like California and Colorado which led the charge on legalizing marijuana before other states are now seeing an uptick in marijuana-induced-psychosis in local ER rooms.
-Nearly 15% of people using amphetamine and more than 11% of people using methamphetamine note psychotic symptoms.
-One can also create permanent brain damage simply by drinking too much alcohol.
Lastly, homelessness itself leads to increases in mental illness and mental illness leads to increases in homelessness. The experience of being homeless can amplify mental illness, trigger, and exacerbate disorders, anxiety, fear, depression, sleeplessness, and substance use - all of which lead back to more homelessness.
Now take all of these factors into account and combine them with how our government’s current approach is to de-stigmatize and enable drug use instead of getting users into treatment. At best, it’s a formula for disaster that will continue to produce more mental illness as drug users slowly erode what’s left of their mental health. Even as the city scatters to figure out how to get our current mentally-ill population off of the streets and into treatment, our progressive drug policy will produce more of the same, like a snake slowly eating itself.
Mayor DeBlasio also reduced the Rikers Island population to under 4,000 for the first time since WW2, likely leading to an increase of people with severe mental illness on our streets and subways. For better or worse, Rikers Island serves as NYC’s largest mental health facility, a recent report claimed that 3,000 inmates currently suffer from mental illness.
The reason people are being hit by trains every 1.9 days isn’t that we don’t spend enough money on homelessness, we spend billions, the problem is that we don’t spend it effectively. At some point, we are going to have to admit that lifelong inpatient psychiatric care is in fact the most humane option we have for those who are far too gone. It is time to finally stop pretending that people suffering from severe mental illness within our subway system will be fine if we just leave them alone.
They won’t.
Until that day finally arrives, we should all expect the stories about people being struck by trains to continue, because we decided that their civil right to suffer and slowly die in public is somehow more important than saving their lives.
Great post, Jason! Very sad and all-too-true story.
Great piece.