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Look look come here.
That was always like his days. Look at him. This was in October of twenty seventeen.
This is Darry Lugones Latino USA producer Maggie Freelin is with her in her living room in Brownsville, one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. It's the summer and they're sitting on the couch in front of them. A large fan is buzzing and water is puddling under a dripping clothesline strung across the room. It's eleven AM and Darry is half asleep in a robe and underwear. She rubs her eyes as she talks about her younger brother Edward.
Oh, look I found one has wrapping things, has music. Okayquems out blue car.
So see how volunteers. So I'm saying that that's the wayte.
And this is his inspiration, little UZI like he just I can't even listen to that man no more because it's just like I guess had and it reminds me of him so much.
And he's like, when I get older, I'm gonna be working.
With him, and then yeah, you don't find him here in the living room, no more wrapping, reading his rhymes and none of that.
That's weird, Like, you know, all I see is a ghost.
Now when I come to the living room or to the kitchen, it just feels so empty without him here, Like it's.
Just he was not the same.
I don't really care you. I'm very attached to him, like very I don't care what we went through, how many downfoad we have. I mean, at the end of the day, not only because he's my brother, but in the house that was my best friend.
The oldest girl and oldest boy of six kids were very close until a year ago, when Edward was eighteen years old. Court records show that on January third of twenty eighteen, Edward Cordero was on a busy subway platform in Brooklyn. Sixty five year old Jacintos Suarrez was also there waiting for the train. According to witnesses and Edward's own statement to the police, Edward was talking about God, spirits, and the devil, and he believed Swatis was the devil.
At two twenty five pm, Edward punched Swatz from behind, causing him to fall onto the train tracks. Swatis suffered a heart attack and died. A New York Daily News video captured Edward moments after his arrest. Do you mean I, Oh, God, who died?
He says.
He's completely confused. He keeps saying, like, what did I do? They keep telling me that I killed the man, but I don't remember.
What happened on that subway platform is tragic and it's extremely rare. Studies show that most people with mental illness are not violent, but the subway attack is also emblematic of something far too common in New York City, and beyond serious mental illness that goes untreated. Edward's sister, Dorry, says he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and although we can't independently confirm that, she says he was in and out of hospitals and on and off medication
for years. She told us that at the time of the subway attack, he had recently been released from a hospital and may have gone off his medication.
He was a dotty. That wasn't mean, like, that was not mean like I thought. That was a devil. And that's why I punched him the way I did.
Edward is now in jail at Riker's Island, awaiting trial, and while his name is no longer in the headlines, his case points to the challenges of treating people with serious mental illness. From Fudromedia and PRX, It's Latino USA. I'm Maria Josa. Today we look at how and why someone like Edward Cordero falls through the cracks of the mental health system. Latino USA producer Maggie Freeling is going to take it from here.
Edward's case is complicated and we're not able to confirm all the details of his past. After Darry spoke with us last summer, she and Edward's public defender stopped communicating with us. I reached out to Edward in jail, but I got no response, and due to medical privacy laws, we don't know exactly how doctors tried to manage Edward's illness, but we do know that Edward's situation is similar to so many others in New York and beyond.
It was like terrible, have we been going through the swim since he was littone? As long as I came Momer, I wouldn't be able to tell you like the age, but I know he was very young.
Darian Edward grew up in New York. They moved around from Staten Island to Brooklyn, and Daria now lives in public housing in Brownsville. The vast majority of Brownsville residents are people of color, and the area is notorious for crime and poor health outcomes. According to Drry, when Edward was a little boy, his father landed in prison and ultimately died by suicide.
My mother was only six years old and he found out that his father has strangled himself in jail.
That's not something you know, a six year old want to know.
As Edward aged, Dorry says she watched his behavior change. He would get aggressive and violent, hitting and biting people.
We didn't know what was wrong.
We thought it was just like you know, teenage behavior basically like oh, you know, him going through a boy face. We never took it as a whole thing up until he got older, I would say, like sixteen, because that's when everything like basically started like that. We started noticing that he had issues when he started getting.
Like really into this church thing.
He just kept talking about, Oh people was Satans, We was warlocks because we wasn't married and we'd have kids and I'm like, what the hell, Like, what is this? And that's when like my mom finally decided, you know, you need to be in a hospital.
And so the cycle began.
Edward would rotate in and out of hospitals during psychotic episodes, but his circumstances did not improve.
And then he had to go in and out of the hospitals. He eighteen, and they just like, oh, like okay, you were allowed to go by yourself.
Allowed to leave the hospital alone because at eighteen, Edward was legally an adult.
Darry says.
One time Edward was released from the hospital without supervision and.
They were released his medicine to him, as that are released in his house.
Edward was left in charge of his own medicine and instead of taking it, darry says, he flushed it down the toilet.
So I'm like, what the like, this is just so unpropression.
And his behavior was getting worse.
He was attacking me for no reason.
The family felt helpless, and at this point we should just sidestep for a minute to lay out what exactly we mean by serious mental illness.
We're typically talking about illnesses that include psychosis.
This is John Snook.
He runs the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that pushes for better treatment for people with serious mental illness.
So things like schizophrenia, schizo effective disorder, and bipolar disorder. They're typically the illnesses that are the most severe, hence the name, and really is one of the most debilitating diseases we have right now.
As a nation.
Serious mental illness is hard enough to handle if you're wealthy and have access to the best care. For someone like Edward, it's the worst kind of slippery slope.
And mental illness is like any other illness, So if you don't provide the sort of care that that person needs, they're going to get worse and eventually you're dealing with the crisis.
And that's what happened with Edward. Several months before the alleged subway attack, Edward was arrested in his neighborhood for robbery. Court records and a police report state that Edward ripped a purse from the shoulder of a twenty five year old woman. He was arrested and charged with seven offenses, including menacing, harassing, and robbery in the second degree, a felony.
He was arraigned and the judge ordered him released without bail, so Edward was back on the street, and Darry says at some point after that he was once again hospitalized.
He was just recently in there. I remember on Thanksgiving he wasn't here with the family. We were speaking to him over the phone. And then next thing you know already but like I would say, like the d of November to like the beginning of December, he was out again. The new year came, he was home with us, and then that night before he had like a relapse over here, like now, I'm just cleaning my room and he just
I don't know where. It was like, oh, like your devil child and throws something and I'm like, are you serious?
Right now?
That was the last I've seen for him. And then the next day come and that's when it happened.
Investigators believe Edward Caderro Sucker punched the grandfather, causing him to fall onto the tracks. Saus died at the hospital.
The day after Edward fought with dari was when he allegedly killed hecinto Suarez. In Edward's own statement after his arrest, he says, I wanted the guy to see my face. End quote see Jesus Christ defeats evil. Jacinto Suarez was a father and grandfather.
His oldest son, barely finding the words to express his grief.
Just stop, stump, tired man.
Can't believe this happened, you.
Know, definitely not definitely not gone to song. It's my daddy.
Tragic events like this one fuel fear and stigma, and they raise the question why is it so hard to provide care to someone with a serious mental illness like Edward? Care that might have prevented this tragedy.
Coming up on Latino USA, we dig into the problems and look at some solutions. Stay with us. Hey, we're back, and we're going to zoom out now to understand how the failure to treat Edward Gordedo's mental illness connects to larger systemic problems. Let's go back now to let you know USA producer Maggie Freeling.
To be clear, tackling everything that's wrong with the mental health system in one episode is pretty impossible. So we're going to focus on a few common problems that we believe directly affected Edward. One of them is the nationwide shortage of inpatient hospital beds for psychiatric care. Emergency hospitalization is one way to provide urgent care to someone in a mental health crisis, as you heard about with Edward.
People are monitored and may receive new or different medication or other treatments.
But as John Snook, the Mental health Advocate.
Explains, unfortunately New York's standard for getting into a hospital bed is very high. It typically requires that a person evidence that they're dangerous to themselves or someone else. And most states have recognized that that's a that's a dumb way to provide medical care. But the standard is are
they dangerous not do they need help? Hopefully their illness is manifesting in such a way that they seem violent or they seem suicidal, which is a terrible thing to hope for, but that's how you get into care.
And Edward did make it into a hospital bed and on multiple occasions, as his sister Darry told us, but it was only temporary and hospital beds are being cut across the country. In twenty sixteen, John Snook's organization, the Treatment Advocacy Center, published a report on the number of state hospital beds available for psychiatric patients. It found that the number of beds had fallen to an all time Low and John Snook says the shortage of beds forces doctors to make difficult decisions.
What you end up with is situations where, unfortunately doctors have to triage, and so they aren't able to think about, well, how can I ensure that this person is in an impatient facility long enough to really get well and recover. They're thinking about how do I prevent the next headline, who is the most seriously ill person that I need to get into this bed right now? And how can I get them out of that bed as quickly as possible because I need it for someone else.
And so to put this all in context, we have to go back to the nineteen sixties. Before then, people with serious mental illness would typically go to state run psychiatric hospitals. But by the middle of the twentieth century these institutions were on the decline, and books and movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest didn't help their reputation.
You guys do nothing but complain about how you can't stand it in this place here, and then you haven't got the.
Guts just to walk out.
How do you think you are for.
Pricing after years of scandals at state run psychiatric institutions.
There was a shift. The government began shutting them down, and we.
Have to offer something more than crowded because studio care and our state institutions.
In nineteen sixty three, President Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act. Under this legislation, custodial mental institutions will be replaced by therapeutic senates. The new law pushed for people with mental illness to be cared for within their own communities, not sent away to institutions. It was a process called deinstitutionalization. While the law established new ideals for serving people with mental illness, it also resulted in many people who needed
long term care ending up on the streets and homeless. Today, while four percent of adults in the US have a serious mental illness, they're over represented in the homeless population and in correctional facilities. And the cutting of hospital beds is not just a problem for patients and their advocates, it's a challenge for doctors too. Doctor Iman Finuse is a psychiatrist and chair of the Department of Psychiatry at
Sunny Downstate Medical Center in New York City. He's worked in the er treating people like Edward.
I can tell you that on a personal level, I have had a number of situations where we've had a patient who really needed hospitation baddling just had nowhere to go because we had no beds in the area.
And so people without family support or other resources have few options. It's also important to say how overstretched healthcare providers are, especially in neighborhoods like Edwards. According to New York City data, Brownsville has the second highest rate of psychiatric hospitalizations in the city and the least access to healthcare. Doctor Finuse works in Flatbush, a neighborhood in Brooklyn close to Edwards, and with similar problems.
We're dealing with communities that are long suffering, and they've been the victims of severe injustice over centuries, and to have this sort of perpetuated in these kinds of illnesses going untreated as a major sort of tragic situation.
So when getting stabilized in a hospital fails, there's still a backup plan that some of the most extreme cases can fall into. And it's controversial. One reason I want to tell you about it is because of how it came about. It began with a situation eerily similar to Edwards in the subway.
Exactly nineteen years to.
The date before Edward allegedly pushed Jacinto Suarez onto the tracks, Kendra Webdeal was also standing on a New York City subway platform. An unmedicated man with schizophrenia pushed her into the path of an oncoming train, and he had recently been released from a hospital. Kendra was thirty two when she died, and after that her family became outspoken about care for people with serious mental illness.
When Kendra was pushed toward death in front of a New York City subway train, we later learned of the ongoing hardships encountered by some of the mentally ill themselves, and the anguish experienced by their families who have tried, often unsuccessfully, to get their loved ones the help they desperately need.
This is Kendra's mom.
In nineteen ninety nine, her family played a critical role in passing Kendro's Law, a state law that created something called assisted outpatient treatment, or AOT. The law makes it possible for a judge to court order someone treatment without putting them in a hospital. The treatment can include medication, therapy, and case management, but it's not easy to qualify. A judge has to decide that the person who is mentally
ill is unable to live safely without supervision. Opponents of Kendra's law, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, say it violates the right to determine one's own treatment, but still courts have upheld the law is constitutional. An independent evaluation found that AOT reduces the likelihood that recipients will be rehospitalized, incarcerated, or end up homeless, and today forty seven states have some version of AOT, and.
Most of all, Kendra's law represents hope that another family will never have to experience the heartache of losing a cherished member of their family.
But assisted out patient treatment is not a cure.
John Snook from the Treatment Advocacy Center says this is the crux of the entire problem. AOT is a band aid from when people are in the worst possible scenario.
Because we are in this cycle of letting people fall apart and only getting them care when they're at their very sickest, we just never catch up. It'd be as if we had a cardiac center, but we only provided care to people once they had a heart attack. And then we were surprised at how expensive and broken the system was.
Although Edward Cordero may have qualified for AOT when he became an adult almost a year before the incident, this specific safety net does not appear to have caught him. Edward's sister darry says she doesn't remember anyone telling her about it as an option. Clearly, creating a system that can manage care for everyone who needs it is a big challenge. It would take years of legislation, funding and training.
But there is one solution that pretty much everyone agrees on that people with serious mental illness need regular monitoring, case management, and support.
We're not of East New York, along with Best, which is a.
Town over we want.
I'm standing on a street corner in Edward's old neighborhood with Ana Miguel. She works with people who have serious mental illness, and she herself was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, so she knows firsthand what the people she sees are going through. Anna works on an ACT team that's ACT for Assertive Community Treatment. Anna's job is to go to the homes of people who are too sick to seek out care and check in Are they eating?
Do they need groceries? Are they taking their medications? Are they sticking with their treatment plans? I asked her to describe a typical debt.
Oooh not easy. I see eleven, sometimes twelve clients in one day. That temperature on Monto Luther King's that it was like zero's. I was out here working, I had thirteen clients that day. My phone finally froze, went black and I couldn't see the last two clients because it was in Coney Island.
Today, I'm going with Anna on a home visit.
We are going to see a client that's actually receptive to this visit.
We can get off here and walk over.
There along with us as a nurse practitioner who takes care of any medical needs that may arise. And for confidentiality reasons, we're not identifying the young man we went to visit coffee, the nurse is giving him a shot of antipsychotic medication. Anna tells me this particular client has been improving steadily since she's been seeing him.
He's so proud of.
Me.
Well, you give me a minute.
Yes, how was it all right?
Awesome? I's good to see.
The check in lasted about twenty minutes.
After the client got his medication, Anna just chatted with him about music, the weather, everyday things, just to make sure he seemed okay, A yeah, that's cool.
And then she left for another apartment.
We are off to the East flat Bush area.
In addition to visits like this, one part of Anna's job is to simply let people know what services are available in their community. She tells me that she walks around to spread the word in the neighborhood, a place that historically access to health services. In October, a brand new health hub opened in East New York. It's run by the Institute for Community Living in New York based nonprofit. It's a pretty big deal and that's why it made local TV news.
This East New York health hub is offering so many services that those who organize it say they want to be the primary model for what healthcare can look like.
Anna's based at the hub, and many of her clients come and see her there too, where they can also get care for things like general checkups and join group programs like art classes and job training. In addition to the hub itself, New York City officials say they're spending more money to expand the use of these act teams like Anna's. In fact, New York City is in the midst of a multi year initiative called Thrive and YC. It's spending hundreds of millions of dollars on mental health services.
Doctor Gary Belkin is one of the people leading that charge. When I spoke with him in September, he was aware of the uphill battle the city's facing to take care of people with serious mental illness.
We're catching up with being satisfied with a system that is not performing in the way that we should expect it to. Part of that is it's fragmented by design, is underfunded by design. It's the source of great stigma and avoidance, and all of those things need to be faced if we're going to have it work better.
Belkin is now the chief of Policy and Strategy for Thrive MIC. The initiative was launched in twenty fifteen and has promised to spend as much as two hundred and fifty million dollars a year on dozens of programs. It's the largest city based mental health initiative in the country, and city leaders have called it a model for communities nationwide. However,
the initiative is facing criticism. The New York City Council and the City's Controller are taking a close look at thrive MIC's funding and effectiveness, and many critics say it fails to prioritize the people who need help them most people with serious mental illness, like Edward.
Doctor Belkin acknowledges that criticism.
That criticism often comes from a very credible place. These are people who have lost loved ones, who have tried to get them through this system that doesn't make sense, and they want that fext.
This is not the first time, it is not the last time that it happened. Pretty sure thing will be so much completely different if they was to open up more places that can handle mental people and help them. They're also human. They're just you know, people that are not in the rest date of mind. They disable and all they need is help, honestly.
Edward Cordero is now in jail at Riker's Island awaiting trial, and he's facing up to twenty five years in prison. Darry told me she visits and talks to her brother often. She says, Edward also misses watching his neph Darry's son grow up.
It doesn't feel right to his talk on the phone with him, and then it's like I'm.
Out to cry.
Like I speak to him on the phone, he's not like a grown man, like speaking of me night. Oh, I just want to tell you they're doing such a great job of my nephew.
And like I'm proud of you, like I like the way you bring him up.
They go, oh, I can't wait till I see you, like and I love you and like, you know, stuff like that.
Oh my god, I guess we mad emotion.
A few months ago, I went to watch one of Edward's court hearings. He was almost unrecognizable from the angry young man in the New York Daily News video. He had gained weight, grew his hair out, and looked soft and sad. The judge checked in with him and his lawyer, and then as he was leaving, Edward turned to his mom. She was sitting behind him crying, and he smiled and whispered, Hi Mom, and in his handcuffs he tried to wave.
This episode was produced by Maggie Freeling. It was edited by Alison McCadam and mixed by Stephanie Lebau. Fact Checking for this episode by Amy Tardiff. The Latino USA team also includes Victori Estrada, Renaldo Leanos Junior, Andrea Lopez Crusado, Johni mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Nour Saudi and Nancy Trujillo.
Penni.
Lei Ramirez is our co executive producer. Our senior engineer is Julia Caruso, our marketing managers lisnowon up. Our theme music was composed by Seger Ruinos. I'm your host and executive producer Maria Josa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I'll see all of you on social media and on Instagram. Aestel Approxima, Yes Bye.
Funding for Latino US coverage of a Culture of Health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Latino USA is made possible in part by W. K. Kellogg Foundation, a partner with Communities where Children Come First, and the TAU Foundation,