Every Random Attack on a New Yorker in 2026, and What Each Attacker's Record Actually Shows

Three things happened in the six days before this page published.

On Saturday, September 5, a 23-year-old man was slashed across the face and abdomen near Seventh Avenue and West 50th Street. NBC New York called it the third knife attack in Times Square in under a week. The man who did it walked off in a beige sweater and has not been caught. Police say it is unclear whether it was a dispute or something random.

On Monday, September 8, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Raul Morales for stabbing two strangers thirteen minutes apart near two Upper West Side synagogues. On Tuesday, September 9, Larry Montes was arraigned for charging the bimah at Central Synagogue during Shabbat services and backhanding a 63-year-old woman to the floor.

Five days before that stretch began, Erin Piacenti died at Bellevue. She was 32, a lawyer at Bank of America, and had recently come back from maternity leave. She left an infant daughter and a husband.

Most New Yorkers carry a rough tally of this year. Almost nobody has the actual list. And nobody has the part that settles every argument about it, which is who these people were before they did it.

This page is the list. Then it’s the records. Every claim on it links to a source, and the records are not what either side of this argument has been telling you.

TL;DR

• Most of the identified attackers had long records. Shaleek Brunson had 53 arrests plus roughly two dozen sealed, and was released twice in the 18 days before he chased a woman into a schoolyard with a hammer.
• The exception is the case that defined the year. Pamela Cisneros, who killed Erin Piacenti in Times Square on August 31, had no arrest history in New York.
• The clearest failure is a discharge, not a statute. Bellevue released Rhamell Burke around 4:40 p.m. on May 7. He killed Ross Falzone, 76, about five hours later.
• Citywide, 2026 is the safest start to a year on record. Felony assault is the lone category still climbing, and assaults on New Yorkers over 65 are up 143 percent against 2018, per NYPD data obtained by the New York Post.

The 2026 list

Every entry traces to a linked source. Attacks police classified as disputes are excluded, with the reason given. Where sourcing is thin or contested, this page says so.

Deaths

Six people were killed. They are listed here as people, not rows.

1. George Ennin, 53

   Jan 5, 2 p.m.Attacker: Sean Jones, 38

   Ghanaian-born security guard and father of two, stabbed walking to work on Third Ave in Mott Haven, blocks from home. His sister Lucy Adusei, a psychiatric nurse, spoke for the family.

2. Richard Williams, 83

   Mar 8, 11:39 a.m.Attacker: Bairon Hernandez, 34

   Air Force veteran, shoved onto the tracks at Lexington Av-63 St. Died nine days later, on Mar 17.

3. Leonidas Baez, 39

   May 4, 11:30 p.m.Attacker: Jayden Sanchez, 17

   Homeless, asleep outside a Times Square restaurant. Stabbed in the face, chest and back.

4. Ross Falzone, 76

   May 7, about 9:30 p.m.Attacker: Rhamell Burke, 32

   Teacher, about fifty years in New York. Shoved down the 18th St station stairs.

5. Rashaun Shettlewood, 32

   Aug 26, about 3:30 p.m.Attacker: Jeffrey Jorge, 37

   Department of Education paraprofessional, a single stab to the chest at Davidson and W Tremont. Police said the attack stemmed from a dispute and it is unclear whether Jorge knew the victims. He is on this list for his record, not because the attack was confirmed random.

6. Erin Piacenti, 32

   Aug 31, 4:24 p.m.Attacker: Pamela Cisneros, 49

   Bank of America vice president, stabbed in the abdomen in Times Square.

The rest

The pattern is age

Ninety. Eighty-five. Eighty-four. Eighty-three. Seventy-six. Seventy-five. Seventy-two. Seventy. Sixty-five. Sixty-five. Sixty-four. Sixty-three.

NYPD data obtained by the New York Post and reported September 2 put assaults on New Yorkers over 65 up 14 percent year over year and up 143 percent against 2018. The department pointed to what it called an “astronomical” 50 percent increase in attackers who target older people within 30 days of a previous attack.

This is the actual story of 2026, and it is not the one being argued about.

Now the records

Count it. Nine of the identified attackers had records, and five of those were extraordinary. One man had been arrested more than fifty times.

So the answer to the question New York has been shouting about since August is: yes, most of them had records, and the city let most of them go, repeatedly, on the way here.

And the single most covered case in the state is the one that doesn’t fit.

The case everyone argued about is the least representative one

Pamela Cisneros was 49 and lived alone in Woodside. Her brother Patrick Peralta told Gothamist she had three daughters and a master’s degree in psychology.

Because she struggled to take daily psychiatric medication, she was prescribed monthly injections instead. “For the last six years now, she was getting injections and nothing was wrong,” Peralta told the Daily News. “As long as she got the medication, she was fine. She never showed any violence towards anybody.” She had recently switched from receiving the shots in person to giving them to herself. “Maybe she didn’t get the last couple of months of injections,” he said.

She had no arrest history in New York. What the NYPD did have was two mental-health contacts. On December 20, 2018, she was drunk and screaming at a hotel on Lexington Avenue near East 49th Street. On March 6, 2019, she jumped onto the E train tracks at Union Turnpike in Queens.

On Monday, August 31, at about 4:24 p.m., she took two kitchen knives out of a red Target bag at West 41st Street and Seventh Avenue. She stabbed Tak Kam, 68, a Rhode Island man who had just come up from the subway with his wife after visiting their son in Brooklyn. About twenty seconds later she stabbed Erin Piacenti in the abdomen.

Officers found her near the substation and talked to her for four minutes. Commissioner Jessica Tisch quoted her reply: “I’m not dropping anything. I would rather kill both of you.” Tasers were deployed twice with no effect. When she advanced, two officers fired.

Piacenti died at Bellevue. Kam was released the next afternoon.

Her father, Mario Cisneros, speaking in Spanish: “I am sorry for what my daughter did. I am suffering like they are suffering.”

There was no criminal case to hold her on. There never had been. No bail reform, no detention policy, no repeat-offender crackdown touches this case at any point. The only thing that might have was a clinic noticing that a woman six years stable on monthly injections had stopped picking them up.

New York spent two weeks arguing about the revolving door over a woman who had never been through it.

Meanwhile, the revolving door

Shaleek Brunson: eighteen days, two releases, one hammer

On July 10, Shaleek Brunson was charged with petty larceny in Queens, referred to an alternative intervention program, and released without bail. He was already facing charges from another Queens larceny in April.

On July 24, he was arrested in Manhattan for stealing $1,300 of items from Bergdorf Goodman. Grand larceny and possession of stolen property. He was released at his arraignment on Sunday, July 26, on non-monetary conditions.

On July 28, two days later, he chased a woman with a hammer onto the grounds of the Jewish Institute of Queens and scuffled with a security guard. Queens DA Melinda Katz indicted him on September 2.

He has, per the Post, 53 arrests on his rap sheet plus roughly two dozen more that have since been sealed, “extensive contact” with the NYPD, and a “long history of mental-health-related episodes.” He was hospitalized after the arrest.

Jesse Daniels: six arrests, six releases

Daniels, per the Post, “has six prior arrests dating back less than a year.” He punched a 64-year-old woman in the Fulton Street station. He tore the head off a pigeon in Penn Station and told the arresting officer, “Is this because I killed the bird? I killed my bird. I just killed it.” He kicked a 7-year-old boy in the ear in Crown Heights. He punched two women, 30 and 31, in back-to-back attacks in front of Goldman Sachs headquarters on West Street.

Released every time. Not one of six arrests in under a year produced either custody or care.

May 7, and the hour that decided it

On the afternoon of Thursday, May 7, police took Rhamell Burke to Bellevue as an emotionally disturbed person. Per the Post, he was “shuffled through triage and into the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program before being released around 4:40 p.m.”

Around 9:30 p.m., Burke trailed Ross Falzone for about 30 yards at the 18th Street station and shoved him down the stairs. He was still wearing his hospital bracelet. Falzone was 76, a teacher from Jessup, Pennsylvania, who had lived in New York for about fifty years. He died at Bellevue, the hospital that had discharged the man who killed him.

Burke had been arrested four times since February: for assaulting a Port Authority police officer, for burglary, for resisting arrest, and in April for assaulting a stranger. He was granted supervised release at that arraignment. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg indicted him for murder on June 17.

Mayor Mamdani ordered an investigation of Bellevue’s psychiatric policies.

Two cases that invert the whole frame

Leonidas Baez was 39, and his last known address was a shelter. On the night of May 4 he was asleep outside a restaurant on 43rd Street. He was stabbed in the face, chest and back and died.

Jayden Sanchez, 17, was arrested after jumping a turnstile at Stillwell Avenue with a scalpel on him. Per CBS New York, “the suspect added he and his two accomplices picked the victim at random as part of an online trend that encourages ‘messing with crackheads.’”

Isaac Davis is 23 and autistic. He wandered off from his family’s NYCHA apartment in the Bronx and was gone more than a week. On July 29 he was found unconscious and bleeding on Second Avenue near East 96th Street, stabbed twice in the back by someone who has never been caught. He couldn’t see who attacked him.

The homeless man and the disabled man in this year’s file are victims.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It’s the epidemiology. People with serious mental illness are victims of violent crime at more than eleven times the general-population rate, per Teplin’s comparison of 936 patients against the National Crime Victimization Survey. More than a quarter of them are victimized in any given year.

What the research actually says

This is the passage most coverage gets wrong in both directions, so here are the numbers with their sources.

Population share. Fazel and Grann examined all 98,082 people discharged with psychosis diagnoses in Sweden over thirteen years. Their finding: a population-attributable risk fraction of 5.2 percent. People with severe mental illness commit about one in twenty violent crimes.

Relative risk. It is real and larger than advocates usually concede. A 2022 meta-analysis in JAMA Psychiatry found pooled odds ratios of 4.5 for men and 10.2 for women, and 17.7 for homicide. The same paper reports the absolute risks: “less than 1 in 20 in women with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and less than 1 in 4 in men over a 35-year period.” Print those together or don’t print either.

Substance use is the modifier. The MacArthur study tracked 1,136 discharged patients against 519 neighbors for a year. Its central finding: “there was no significant difference between the prevalence of violence by patients without symptoms of substance abuse and the prevalence of violence by others living in the same neighborhoods who were also without symptoms of substance abuse.” And violence in both groups “was most frequently targeted at family members and friends, and most often took place at home.”

Elbogen and Johnson, following 34,653 people across two waves, found that “severe mental illness alone did not predict future violence.” Two honest caveats, because that finding gets quoted as settled and it isn’t. In 2012 Van Dorn, Volavka and Johnson reanalyzed the same dataset and reached the opposite conclusion, finding people with serious mental illness were “significantly more likely to be violent” regardless of substance use. Real, modest, and still small next to substance use and prior violence.

Criminal history outweighs psychiatry. The most recent synthesis, pooling 47 longitudinal studies, ranks the predictors: criminal history 3.50, substance misuse 2.36, and treatment-related factors protective at 0.54. The strongest single predictor of violence in psychosis is having been violent before, which is exactly what the record column on this page is measuring.

Medication works. A Swedish study of 82,647 patients compared each person to themselves on and off medication. “Violent crime fell by 45% in patients receiving antipsychotics.”

And the finding that should be driving policy. Nielssen and Large pooled ten studies of homicide and psychosis. “38.5% of homicides occurred during the first episode of psychosis, prior to initial treatment.” The rate during a first episode is 1 in 629 presentations. After treatment it is 1 in 9,090 patients per year. A rate ratio of 15.5.

Read that against everything New York is doing. Nobody is under a court order before their first episode. The largest preventable share of this violence happens in the window before the system has ever met the person. Coercion cannot reach it. Access can.

The base rates

• 122 murders in the first half of 2026, “beating the previous record of 136 set in 2017.” Vital City’s midyear count, which includes later-reported cases, is 128, down 21 percent.
• 322 shooting incidents, beating the previous record of 337. 381 shooting victims, beating 397.
• Major crime down 5.8 percent, from 58,581 to 55,157.
• Through early September, per NY1: murder down 24.1 percent. No murders, rapes or shootings in the subway in August.

Mamdani in July: “Over the past six months, New York City has experienced the safest start to any year on record.” That is true.

And here is the one number moving the wrong way.

• Felony assault: 14,802 complaints in the first half, up for a sixth consecutive year, 48 percent above 2019.
• Now about one in six felony complaints, versus one in ten in 2006.
• 41 of 78 precincts recorded more felony assaults than a year earlier.
• Murder and shootings are the only major categories below 2019. Overall major crime remains 25.5 percent above it.

Where the increase lives: the citywide net rise was just 57 complaints, and 35 of them landed in a single precinct, the 20th on the Upper West Side, which went from 32 to 67. Of those 35: 14 at homeless shelters, which recorded zero in the same period last year. Fourteen on the street. Five at public schools. Four in the subway.

Also worth holding: per the July 2 briefing, “domestic violence accounts for 42 percent of felony assaults citywide.” A large share of the rise everyone reads as stranger danger happens at home.

The subway, told straight

The subway recorded 1,071 major felonies in the first half across roughly 650 million rides, down 2.2 percent. Grand larceny fell about 10 percent while robbery and felony assault together rose about 7 percent.

One series tells the whole subway story on its own. Per the NYPD Transit Bureau’s own report to the MTA board, felony assaults in the subway went from 373 in 2019 to 593 in 2025, up 59 percent, while robbery fell from 546 to 398. The 593 is the highest figure in a table that runs back to 1997.

Track shoves were the number that moved. Per the NYPD, “there have been nine subway push incidents so far this year, compared to 19 all of last year and a total of 26 in 2024.” That was March 10. The department has not published an update since.

For scale the other way, from Vital City’s December analysis: “Of the city’s 472 stations, the 30 stations with the largest number of violent incidents account for 50% of violent crimes.” Late-night risk runs “more than 20 times higher” than rush hour. And one number that kills a popular theory outright: “fewer than 1 in 100 of those arrested for fare beating from 2016 to 2021 were subsequently arrested for a violent subway crime over the next two years.”

The number that complicates all of this

Here the marquee cases and the underlying population split apart, and it’s the most useful thing on this page.

Vital City’s analysis of subway crime, by Aaron Chalfin, John Hall and Paul Reeping, using data through 2023. Among people arrested for violent subway crime in 2022 and 2023:

• “70.7% had a prior arrest for violent crime anywhere in the City during the prior six years.”
• 16.8% had a prior arrest for violent subway crime.

And among frequent violent offenders, those with two or more arrests: 59% had documented mental health issues, 41% were documented as homeless, 65% had either. In the top decile of subway arrestees with a history of subway violence, 80% have documented mental health issues. The December update puts it at 89% with “a documented history of homelessness, mental illness or both.”

So the general population of violent subway offenders is overwhelmingly repeat, overwhelmingly sick, overwhelmingly unhoused. That is the strongest case anyone has for “we know exactly who these people are,” and it is real.

But 2026’s worst individual attacks were not committed by that population. Cisneros, Griffin and Morales are not in those percentages. The catastrophic stranger killings skew toward people with thin records precisely because someone with fifteen violent arrests usually gets caught before the fifteenth becomes a homicide.

Two populations. Two problems. Conflating them is how this argument has stayed stuck for a decade.

Albany already passed the law

On May 9, 2025, Hochul signed changes to the Mental Hygiene Law, effective August 7, 2025. The budget language defined “likelihood to result in serious harm” to include “a person at substantial risk of physical harm because their mental illness makes them unable or unwilling to provide for their own essential needs such as food, clothing, necessary medical care, personal safety, or shelter.” A parallel change to section 9.27 let a psychiatric nurse practitioner sign one of the two required certificates. Kendra’s Law was strengthened, with $16.5 million for county AOT programs and $2 million for state oversight staff.

Here is what almost every account of that law gets wrong. It was not a new power. The state says so itself.

OMH’s own August 2025 guidance states: “While this standard has previously appeared in case law and clinical practice, the amendments, effective August 7, 2025, expressly expand the statute to codify this involuntary admission criteria.” It names the case: “The Appellate Division’s First Department’s decision in Boggs v. Health Hospitals Corp held that a person’s inability to meet their basic living needs was sufficient to establish dangerousness to self.” That was 1987.

And the guidance “supersedes February 2022” versions. The state’s own Kendra’s Law evaluation records what that February 2022 guidance said: law enforcement “may take into custody ‘persons who appear to be mentally ill and who display an inability to meet basic living needs, even when there is no recent dangerous act.’” Three years before the statute changed.

The 2025 law removed an excuse, not a barrier. It was in force for every attack on this page. Rhamell Burke was evaluated under it and discharged in about an hour.

And nobody is measuring it

The city does publish removal counts, in an annual report required by Local Law 116 of 2023. What they show is worse than silence.

The city removed more people and admitted a smaller share of them. Officer-initiated transports rose 3.4 percent, clinician-initiated more than doubled, and the admission rate for the subset that gets tracked fell ten points. The 2025 report states plainly that it does not have “access to outcome data for private hospital networks.”

The City Council’s analysis of the 2024 numbers found that “while Black New Yorkers make up about 23% of the city’s population, they accounted for 54% of involuntary hospital transports.” And that transports “were more than 5 times as likely to originate in a private residence than a public place,” which the Council called “inconsistent with the Mayor’s rhetoric that the policy is aimed at helping those struggling with mental illness in public spaces and on public transportation.”

Then the reporting stops. Outcomes exist “only for involuntary transfers initiated by a clinician,” the Council found, “even though NYPD initiated involuntary transports are 10 times more likely.” And the report states that the city cannot count unique individuals, “as responding clinicians and officers are unable to gather personal and biographical information of each person.”

So there is no way to know whether the city removed 8,672 people last year or removed the same few hundred people over and over. That limitation is not a footnote. It makes the single most important question in this debate unanswerable by design.

The NYPD, meanwhile, publishes 36 categories of public report. They include animal cruelty, parking permits, towed vehicles, drones, subway fare evasion and opioid antagonist deployments. Not one concerns mental health.

The department does have the data. In October 2022 it produced an internal analysis, reported by amNY: “out of 38,608 ‘7-major’ year-to-date arrests, 9,049 (which is about 23.4%) have an EDP history,” and in transit, “163 out of 421 7-major year-to-date arrests (38.7%).” The department has never published that analysis or repeated it.

The gap runs deeper than it looks. The belief that subway pushers are overwhelmingly psychotic rests on a single study that ends in 1991. Martell and Dietz examined the 49 subway pushings recorded in New York from 1975 through 1991, had usable records on 20 offenders, and found that “19 (95%) of these offenders were psychotic, and 13 (65%) were homeless.” “The victims of these crimes were always strangers.” It may still be true. In thirty-four years, nobody has checked.

Kendra’s Law, and the report the state is fighting about

New York has 4,021 people under assisted outpatient treatment orders as of August 4, 2026, per the state’s own dataset, 1,863 of them in New York City: Bronx 468, Manhattan 449, Brooklyn 431, Queens 429, Staten Island 89. Courts have granted about 96 percent of petitions since 1999.

In June 2026 the state published a 392-page independent evaluation it had commissioned from the Human Services Research Institute and the University of Pittsburgh, covering 11,553 AOT recipients against a comparison group in voluntary assertive community treatment, using data from 2016 through 2023.

Its findings are not what the program’s champions say they are.

• AOT “had significantly better outcomes in four of the 10 outcomes,” including housing and risk of harm to others. The composite risk measure fell from 33.5 percent to 12.8 percent, with reported physical violence dropping from 30.2 to 9.2.
• On both arrest measures, the report’s own table reads “Voluntary ACT Significantly Better.”
• “The data does not support the widespread belief that people under an AOT order would not have voluntarily engaged in treatment otherwise.” At intake, 52 percent of the AOT cohort took medication as prescribed most or all of the time, against 41 percent of the voluntary group.
• 10.9 percent of AOT recipients were homeless or unstably housed at intake, against 29.2 percent of the voluntary group. The program is not reaching the population it is publicly sold on.
• “34% had at least one reported removal during the study period, and 17% had more than one.” “Black recipients were 27% more likely than others to have a removal report.” The report calls this “the one area in which disparities are clearly observed within the implementation of AOT itself.”
• Only 17 percent received outpatient follow-up within seven days of a psychiatric emergency visit.

On August 26, 2026, one of the evaluation’s own co-leads went public. Nev Jones, a University of Pittsburgh researcher and principal investigator, said OMH’s public statements had “mischaracterized, misrepresented or overtly ‘spun’ the evaluation study, its findings and their complexity.” “The harms are far from insignificant or trivial. These are very, very serious harms, as people are experiencing them.” She said OMH “demanded call logs with journalists.”

OMH Chief Medical Officer Dr. Miriam Tepper’s response: the interview sample “was not designed to be representative of the population as a whole.”

Two things to hold. The evaluation’s data ends in 2023, so it says nothing about the 2025 law. And Kendra’s Law faces reauthorization with this contested report as the evidence base.

The beds: the constraint is staffing

State psychiatric centers operated 3,597 beds in May 2026, per OMH’s monthly report: 2,446 adult, 323 children’s, 828 forensic. 1,459 are in New York City. The report’s own footnote defines the figure: “Budgeted Capacity reflects the number of operating beds during the month of the report.” Budgeted means staffed, not appropriated.

In January 2020 the same count was 3,376. Six years later it is up 221.

The State Comptroller’s March 2024 report found that “from April 2014 to December 2023, statewide inpatient psychiatric capacity decreased by 10.5 percent, or 990 beds, to 8,457 beds,” and that “nearly three-quarters of the decline in inpatient capacity was driven by fewer beds in State psychiatric centers.” Twenty counties, with nearly 900,000 people, have no inpatient beds at all.

The state tried to force beds back. In January 2023 Hochul ordered hospitals to reopen offline psychiatric beds, with fines up to $2,000 a day. The Comptroller’s finding: “As of April 17, 2023, only 222 out of 843 off-line beds had returned to operational status.” In December 2023 the Executive announced “nearly 500” restored, “but details regarding these beds have not been released publicly.”

And why they stayed closed, in the state’s own words. Hospitals told OMH and DOH the challenges included “recruiting, hiring and paying for additional staff, the costs of new beds and equipment, and limited options for discharging patients to residential settings or longer-term psychiatric care.” Staff, first.

New York operates about 18 state psychiatric center beds per 100,000 residents, per the Manhattan Institute, down from 27.4, a level the Treatment Advocacy Center already called “a serious bed shortage.”

The May 2025 budget’s headline bed commitment was “$160 million to create 100 new forensic inpatient psychiatric beds on Wards Island.” Forensic beds serve court-involved patients. They do not relieve the emergency room.

The outreach programs, measured against their own numbers

B-HEARD, the city’s non-police mental health response, launched in 2021 and “is currently operational in 31 of the city’s 78 NYPD precincts. That represents about 40% of the city, with nine teams available across that area at any given time.” Gothamist’s reporting is direct about why it has not grown: “Staffing has been one of the key challenges to expanding the program so far.”

There is a list of the hardest cases. It is real. A November 2023 mayoral release said more than half of “the 100 hardest to reach New Yorkers living on city streets,” the people on “the Coordinated Behavioral Health Task Force’s two ‘Top 50’ lists,” had moved indoors. The public learned it existed because, as the Comptroller’s Safer for All report notes citing the Times, Jordan Neely was on it.

Mamdani campaigned on removing police from mental health response. He has since walked that back. Per Gothamist, he is now “exploring the use of co-response teams that pair police with clinicians or peers.”

The direction nobody counts

Jabez Chakraborty was 22 and has schizophrenia. His family called for help. Police came and shot him in January. He survived, and the Queens DA charged him with attempted assault over the mayor’s objection. Mamdani: “His handcuffs should be removed and he should be receiving the care that he needs.”

Chaz Fray was fatally shot by police in December 2025 during what his family described as a mental health crisis. In both cases, Gothamist reported, “family members said, their sons were in mental health crisis.”

Mariela Ruiz-Angel, a Georgetown Law researcher advising Mamdani, reviewed body camera footage and found officers spent minutes shouting commands before anyone attempted a conversation. Former FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, on where the argument has landed: “We are spending all of our energy discussing the point in the system where the least can be done.”

Caveats this page will not bury

The Hernandez record comes from DHS. The March 12 release describes “15 prior charges such as simple assault, domestic violence, obstruction of police, possession of a weapon, drug possession, and aggravated assault,” and says he was “deported four different times, most recently in 2020.” Charges, not convictions, with no years or jurisdictions, and no New York outlet has independently reported a local arrest record. The attack, Richard Williams’s death, and the murder indictment announced by DA Bragg are all confirmed. The Manhattan DA charges him as Bairon Hernandez; DHS uses Posada-Hernandez.

Anthony Griffin’s record is unreconciled. Commissioner Tisch said he “had three prior arrests,” per CBS. The Post reported “at least 13 previous arrests.” This page uses the NYPD figure and flags the conflict. Filmmaker Gil Rios, who had been documenting Griffin, a battle rapper known as Fox 5, told NY1 he “dealt with mental health issues with the fact that his mom passed away,” that “he was dealing with the shelter system,” and that “he never spoke like that. He was a God-fearing man.” Separately, a widely circulated claim that Griffin had a 2019 bomb-scare arrest for leaving rice cookers in a subway station belongs to a different man, Larry Griffin II. Search engines conflate them.

Unsettled details. The Parsons Boulevard victim is reported as 63 in one QNS story and 64 in another. The Brownsville stabbing victim is an unnamed 75-year-old in the Post and, in a Daily News roundup this page could not independently confirm, Betty Ellerbe, 83. Erin Piacenti’s family said August 31 was her first day back from maternity leave; NBC New York reported that, and other outlets say she had recently returned. Her brother’s account of Cisneros’s medication runs “four years, five years” in Gothamist and “the last six years” in the Daily News.

One statistic to distrust on sight. Anyone can compute from public jail data that about 68 percent of people held at Rikers on a homicide charge are under mental observation. It means little, because 62 percent of everyone in custody is (4,067 of 6,549 on September 10). Assault charges run 76 percent, weapon possession 48. The baseline is the story, and any comparison run against zero instead of against it produces a frightening number and no information.

“Random” is doing heavy lifting. The September 3 stabbing at 96th Street is excluded because both men were charged. A one-punch homicide in Bushwick on September 4, a fatal stabbing in East Flatbush the same day, the parade-route stabbings in Crown Heights on September 7, and a beating death at Rufus King Park on September 8 all followed arguments. Jeffrey Jorge’s case is in the deaths list with its caveat because his record is the point.

Cases that are not 2026. Kamel Hawkins and Joseph Lynskey at 18th Street was December 31, 2024. The F train burning was December 22, 2024. The No. 3 train burning was December 1, 2025. Christopher Betancourt’s Union Square stabbing was December 10, 2025. And ABC News re-dated the Grand Central machete attack to September 10, 2026 in its feed this week. It happened on April 11.

What to take from this

The city has gotten extraordinarily good at preventing New Yorkers from being shot. Murders and shootings are at all-time lows. That is real and it is not a talking point.

It has gotten worse at three specific things, and this year’s file names all three.

It cannot keep a man with fifty-three arrests and a documented mental-health history off the street for more than 48 hours. It released Shaleek Brunson twice in eighteen days.

It cannot decide whether the man in Bellevue’s psychiatric emergency program should walk out after an hour. It decided he should, and Ross Falzone died on a staircase five hours later.

And it cannot find the people who have never been arrested at all, because it has built almost nothing to look for them. Pamela Cisneros had a diagnosis, a treatment plan, six stable years by her brother’s account, and a lapse nobody caught. The research says that window, before or between treatment, is where the largest preventable share of this violence lives.

Albany rewrote a law in 2025 that, by the state’s own admission, the courts had already written in 1987. The program it is expanding was just evaluated by researchers the state hired, who say the state is misrepresenting them. Removals went up and admissions went down. And nobody, at any level of government, can say how many people they are picking up, because the form doesn’t ask.

Ross Falzone was 76 and he was walking down a staircase in Chelsea.

For how the city’s money moves through these systems, see the NYC budget process. For the state side, see what the 2026 state budget did to New York City. For who decides any of it, NYC politics.

Sources

Every incident and record above was checked against the source text, not a summary of it.

Deaths and records

1. Bronx District Attorney, “Brooklyn Man Indicted for Attempted Murder,” Jan. 22, 2026 (Aleshin).
2. New York Post, “Bronx dad savagely stabbed to death on the way to NYC job,” Jan. 7, 2026 (Ennin; Jones’s 15 arrests, four EDP reports, 2019 plea). Gothamist, “Bronx man arrested in stabbing death of 53-year-old Melrose resident,” Jan. 7, 2026. New York Post, “Daughter of NYC dad randomly stabbed to death…” Jan. 10, 2026.
3. Manhattan District Attorney, “D.A. Bragg Announces Murder Indictment in Upper East Side Subway Shovings,” March 30, 2026 (Hernandez; Williams). CBS New York, “83-year-old veteran fighting for life…” March 10, 2026 (subway push counts). U.S. Department of Homeland Security, release, March 12, 2026.
4. CBS New York, “Teen arrested in deadly Times Square stabbing,” May 7, 2026 (Baez; Sanchez).
5. New York Post, “Maniac just released from psych ward fatally pushes elderly man…” May 8, 2026 (Burke’s CPEP discharge, four arrests, supervised release, bracelet). New York Post, “Murdered teacher’s family, pals go scorched earth…” June 1, 2026 (Falzone). amNewYork, “Mamdani orders probe of Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric policies…” May 9, 2026. Manhattan District Attorney, Burke indictment, June 17, 2026.
6. New York Post, “NYC school worker killed, friend stabbed during unhinged attack by maniac with 13 prior busts,” Aug. 27, 2026 (Shettlewood; Jorge).
7. Gothamist, “Woman NYPD killed after Times Square stabbings had long mental health struggle, brother says,” Sept. 1, 2026. NBC New York, “Times Square stabber had mental health history with police before deadly attack,” Sept. 1, 2026. ABC7, victims and suspect identified, Sept. 1, 2026; father speaks, Sept. 2, 2026. New York Daily News (Jacobson, Annese, Parascandola), Sept. 1, 2026, syndicated via Tribune Content Agency (injections; 2018 and 2019 incidents). Boston Globe, “Rhode Island man injured in Times Square stabbing was visiting son,” Sept. 2, 2026. NBC New York, maternity leave, Sept. 2, 2026.
8. New York Post, “Hammer-wielding nut with over 50 busts…” July 29, 2026 (Brunson). Queens District Attorney, indictment, Sept. 2, 2026.
9. New York Post, “Unhinged NYC vagrant charged with hitting baby girl in stroller…” July 19, 2026 (Okon).
10. New York Post, “Maniac with history of randomly attacking women…” April 24, 2026 (Daniels).
11. New York Post, “Penn Station slashing suspect was free despite eerily similar 2022 attack,” June 8, 2026. amNewYork, “Penn Station stabbing spree suspect indicted…” June 29, 2026 (Deleon).
12. New York Post, “Homeless nut charged with stabbing 75-year-old woman twice released without bail last year,” June 2, 2026 (Moore).
13. New York Post, “Maniac allegedly shoves woman, 85, to ground…” June 3, 2026 (Valentine).
14. CBS New York, “Grand Central stabbing investigation,” April 11, 2026. Gothamist, “Loved ones say accused Grand Central slasher…had no violent history,” April 2026. NY1, “Filmmaker speaks out…” April 14, 2026. New York Post, “Machete-wielding nut…rapped under name ‘Fox 5’,” April 13, 2026 (Griffin).
15. New York Post, “Madman eyed in NYC attacks was ‘lonely’ but ‘super cordial’…” July 24, 2026. amNewYork, “Upper West Side stabbings: Prime suspect charged…” July 24, 2026. West Side Rag, update, July 23, 2026. Gothamist, indictment, Sept. 8, 2026 (Morales).
16. amNewYork, Hurlock arrest, March 6, 2026. Brooklyn District Attorney, indictment, April 1, 2026.
17. Manhattan District Attorney, Castillo indictment, Feb. 18, 2026. Gothamist, Negron arrest, Jan. 2026. amNewYork, Lafayette Av shove, Feb. 2026. ABC7, Signal arrest, Feb. 2026. amNewYork, Dyckman St shove, March 18, 2026. amNewYork, W 60th St punches, March 5, 2026.
18. Queens District Attorney, Valencia Ponce indictment, 2026. New York Post, “NYC mom randomly slashed four times…” March 16, 2026. Queens District Attorney, Batita charges, April 2026. New York Post, Red Hook park attack, May 17, 2026.
19. QNS, Jarrett arrest, June 2026. amNewYork, Fordham Rd shove, July 15, 2026; Sutter Av stabbing, July 10, 2026; Garcia arrest, Aug. 2026; 180th St shove, Aug. 27, 2026; Mercedes arrest, Aug. 19, 2026; Montes rampage, Sept. 2026. New York Post, Davis stabbing, July 30, 2026.
20. New York Post, “Brute throws discarded baby crib…” Sept. 2, 2026 (Brighton Beach; elderly assault figures, NYPD data). NBC New York, “Third knife attack in under a week reported in Times Square,” Sept. 6, 2026.

Crime statistics

21. Vital City, “The State of Crime in New York City, Midyear 2026,” Aug. 25, 2026 (Paul Reeping).
22. Vital City, “Just the Facts on New York City Subway Crime,” Jan. 31, 2025 (Chalfin, Hall, Reeping). Vital City, “Subway Safety: What the Data Show,” Dec. 16, 2025.
23. NYPD, “NYPD Announces Fewest Shooting Incidents, Shooting Victims, and Murders in Recorded History for the First Half of the Year,” July 2, 2026. Office of the Mayor, briefing transcript, July 2, 2026. NY1, “NYPD data shows record low shootings and murders this summer,” Sept. 3, 2026.
24. NYPD Transit Bureau, “MTA Report, Crime Statistics, December 2025,” report TR-0052, with 1997–2025 annual table.
25. amNewYork, “NYPD crime stats: emotionally disturbed arrests,” Oct. 2022. NYPD, Reports and Analysis index, checked Sept. 10, 2026. NYC Department of Correction, “Daily Inmates In Custody,” NYC Open Data, queried Sept. 10, 2026.

Law and policy

26. Governor Kathy Hochul, “Governor Hochul Signs Legislation to Improve Mental Health Care and Strengthen Treatment for Serious Mental Illness as Part of FY 2026 Budget,” May 9, 2025.
27. NYS Office of Mental Health, “Guidance for the Involuntary and Custodial Transportation of Individuals for Emergency Assessments and for Emergency and Involuntary Inpatient Psychiatric Admissions,” updated August 2025. Abrams Fensterman, “Important Changes to New York’s Mental Hygiene Law,” 2025.
28. NYC Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health, “Annual Report of Involuntary Transports, 2025,” March 2026. New York City Council, “Involuntary Removals Memo,” March 21, 2025.
29. Human Services Research Institute and University of Pittsburgh, “Independent Evaluation of New York State Assisted Outpatient Treatment: Final Report,” submitted to NYS OMH, June 2026. NYS Open Data, “AOT (Assisted Outpatient Treatment) Court Orders,” as of Aug. 4, 2026. WAMC / Buffalo Toronto Public Media (Emyle Watkins), “NYS Kendra’s Law independent evaluation authors claim the state is misrepresenting their findings,” Aug. 26, 2026.
30. NYS Office of Mental Health, “May 2026 Monthly Report: OMH Facility Performance Metrics and Community Service Investments,” updated June 5, 2026, via OMH statistics. Office of the New York State Comptroller, “Mental Health: Inpatient Service Capacity,” March 2024. Manhattan Institute (Stephen Eide), “Systems Under Strain,” Sept. 2025.
31. Gothamist (Charles Lane, Caroline Lewis), “After police shootings, Mamdani faces new pressure to overhaul NYC’s mental health crisis response,” Feb. 16, 2026. Office of the Mayor, “Mayor Adams: More Than Half of Hardest-to-Reach New Yorkers Have Moved From Street Into…,” Nov. 29, 2023. NYC Comptroller, “Safer for All,” Jan. 13, 2025.

Peer-reviewed research

32. Fazel S, Grann M. “The population impact of severe mental illness on violent crime.” Am J Psychiatry 2006;163(8):1397–403. PMID 16877653.
33. Whiting D, Gulati G, Geddes JR, Fazel S. “Association of Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders and Violence Perpetration in Adults and Adolescents From 15 Countries.” JAMA Psychiatry 2022;79(2):120–132. PMID 34935869.
34. Steadman HJ et al. “Violence by people discharged from acute psychiatric inpatient facilities and by others in the same neighborhoods.” Arch Gen Psychiatry 1998;55(5):393–401. PMID 9596041.
35. Elbogen EB, Johnson SC. “The intricate link between violence and mental disorder.” Arch Gen Psychiatry 2009;66(2):152–61. PMID 19188537. Van Dorn R, Volavka J, Johnson N. “Mental disorder and violence: is there a relationship beyond substance use?” Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 2012;47(3):487–503. PMID 21359532.
36. Lagerberg T et al. “Systematic review of risk factors for violence in psychosis: 10-year update.” Br J Psychiatry 2025;226(2):100–107. PMID 40091674.
37. Fazel S et al. “Antipsychotics, mood stabilisers, and risk of violent crime.” Lancet 2014;384(9949):1206–14. PMID 24816046.
38. Nielssen O, Large M. “Rates of homicide during the first episode of psychosis and after treatment.” Schizophr Bull 2010;36(4):702–12. PMID 18990713.
39. Teplin LA et al. “Crime victimization in adults with severe mental illness.” Arch Gen Psychiatry 2005;62(8):911–21. PMID 16061769.
40. Martell DA, Dietz PE. “Mentally disordered offenders who push or attempt to push victims onto subway tracks in New York City.” Arch Gen Psychiatry 1992;49(6):472–5. PMID 1599372.

Last updated September 10, 2026. Cases are still moving through court and this page will be updated.