Homeless man’s alleged killing spree exposes NYC’s ‘whole rotten system’

By Ray Sanchez, John Miller and Sabrina Shulman, CNN

(CNN) — Tall and disheveled, with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard, Ramon Rivera was just one month out of jail when he approached a construction worker early Monday and fatally stabbed him without saying a word, police said.

He was not done, police said. An urban nightmare was unfolding on a mild autumn morning in New York.

The 51-year-old made his way across Manhattan and, more than two hours later, police and prosecutors said, he fatally stabbed a fisherman and then a woman sitting on a park bench. His clothes covered in blood, Rivera was arrested shortly after the third attack with two bloody kitchen knives in his possession, according to police.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams described Rivera as a homeless man with a criminal history and “severe mental health issues,” an example of failures of the criminal justice and mental health systems.

The seemingly random killings highlight the challenges confronting New York City and other municipalities across the country as they maneuver a delicate balancing act – how to deal with soaring homelessness and mental illness and its perceived – and actual – impact on public safety.

“We always hear something is being done but nothing changes, and every six months something unthinkable happens,” said Mary Brosnahan, who for three decades led the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy and service organization. “And that’s what gives everybody a sense of insecurity.”

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat who represents the area where the stabbings occurred, on Thursday joined nearly a dozen city and state elected officials to demand accountability, saying Rivera was “released into the public without sufficient care or oversight.”

“Mr. Rivera’s case is a damning indictment of the failures of the criminal justice and mental health systems in New York City,” Nadler and the others wrote in a letter Thursday, echoing the mayor. The three deaths “may have been prevented,” they said in the letter.

Adams, referring to Rivera, said part of the investigation will be to determine “why he was on the street.”

‘We do not want to set you up for failure’

A month before his alleged rampage, Rivera stood in a Manhattan courtroom.

After serving about eight months in Rikers Island for burglary and an attempted assault on a correction officer, Rivera appeared before a judge one day after his October 17 release – this time for the alleged theft of a $1,500 acrylic bowl that occurred before his jail stint, according to police and court records.

He was at Rikers from February 19 through the middle of last month – with some stays at the Bellevue prison ward in Manhattan, police records show – when he was released due to time served, New York City Department of Correction spokesperson Latima Johnson said.

In May, police records obtained by CNN show, Rivera spent time at the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward in Manhattan, where he was involved in an assault on a correction officer. He eventually pleaded guilty to attempted third-degree assault and was sentenced to 90 days concurrent with his time for burglary – which he completed last month.

Rivera was “experiencing housing insecurity, food insecurity, and it’s difficult for him to keep a regular schedule,” his Legal Aid Society attorney told the judge at the October arraignment, arguing for a less restrictive level of supervision, according to a court transcript. CNN has sought comment from his attorney at the time.

“His time on (Rikers Island) sent an unequivocal message,” his lawyer told the court, asking for Rivera to be released on his own recognizance. “He plans to fight this case.”

At the recommendation of prosecutors, the judge ordered supervised release, a program the city touts as providing “community-based supervision and support” for people with pending cases. Still, the judge noted the “six failures to appear” in court on Rivera’s rap sheet.

“We do not want to set you up for failure, but we do want to connect you with services and to make sure that you’re coming to court,” the judge told Rivera.

“Your next court date is on December 4th.”

It’s unclear what, if any, services Rivera received in the month leading up to the stabbings. There was no immediate response to CNN requests for comment from the Manhattan supervised release program that handled his case.

‘Most people with mental illness are not violent’

At the October 18 arraignment, Rivera’s Legal Aid lawyer told the court he was staying at the city’s intake center for homeless men in Manhattan. The New York City Department of Social Services (DSS), which oversees the Department of Homeless Services, said privacy and social services laws prevented the agency from confirming or disclosing client information.

“We cannot comment on an ongoing investigation,” a DSS spokesperson told CNN via email on Friday. “Furthermore, the process of assessing and verifying the facts will necessarily take time.”

On Tuesday, Rivera was back before a judge.

Now he was being arraigned on three counts of first-degree murder for what a prosecutor called “a bloody and violent rampage which took the lives of three innocent New Yorkers who were doing nothing more than going about their day.” He was indicted on Friday and will be back in court December 19, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Toward the end of the proceeding, the arraignment judge referred to Rivera’s October court appearance, saying the larceny case was “non-bail qualifying.” The previous judge, she said, “placed the defendant on the highest tier and level permittable by law on the supervised release program.”

The charges in the larceny case were “not bail eligible, meaning he can’t be held behind bars unless convicted,” the Manhattan DA’s office said in a statement Friday.

In 2019, New York state passed legislation removing or limiting the use of cash bail against defendants accused of many misdemeanors or nonviolent offenses. The reforms aim to ensure most defendants are not held in jail while awaiting trial solely because they cannot afford cash bail. Several states and jurisdictions have passed versions of bail reform for misdemeanor offenses.

The bail reform made “release before trial automatic for most people accused of misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies,” according to the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan research foundation. It was later amended to allow judges more situations to institute cash bail.

In the triple-murder case, the judge on Tuesday ordered a psychiatric exam and that Rivera be held without bail. He pleaded not guilty. CNN has reached out to his attorney for comment.

Over the last two years, Rivera had at least eight arrests, mostly for burglary and theft, according to police records. His rap sheet dates to 2003 – at least 20 encounters with law enforcement – and spans Florida, Ohio and New Jersey. Outside New York, he had arrests for assault, battery and driving under the influence.

In New Jersey, he was accused of stealing CBD buds and damaging property from a Hoboken cannabis shop, prosecutors said. In the Bronx, he got an adjournment contemplating dismissal in June for a case involving the theft of steaks from a supermarket, according to prosecutors.

“In most cases, when you look at the intersection of people living with mental illness and criminal justice, it’s a lot of those more petty crimes,” said Matthew Shapiro, senior director of government and community affairs at the National Alliance on Mental Illness in New York.

“A lot of it is survival mode. And most people with mental illness are not violent and are much more likely to be the victim of a crime than a perpetrator. In this case, there’s someone who seems to have gone through several different systems and kind of has fallen through the cracks,” Shapiro said.

One of Rivera’s encounters with the NYPD occurred on November 19, 2023, when officers found him lying on a curb. He acted erratically and told officers he had pain in his left forearm, according to police records. The next month, the records show, he called police to say he was “feeling suicidal and homicidal.” An ambulance took him to a hospital.

“He reached out to the police. He was suicidal,” said Brosnahan, the author of a new book, “‘They Just Need to Get a Job’: 15 Myths on Homelessness.”

“And then what happens is, he’s just released back into the general population. That’s not a coherent plan for anyone and what we see time and again is, suddenly the person escalates and does something horrific like a subway shoving, a slashing.”

Victims were ‘alone and distracted’

The first victim of Monday’s homicidal spree, Angel Lata Landi, was a construction worker originally from Ecuador, his sister Mariana Lada told CNN. She said her brother had been living in the US for 20 years and he took care of their sister’s son after she died a few years ago.

At around 8:20 a.m., Lata Landi, 36, a Peekskill, New York, resident, was standing in front of a construction site near Chelsea when a bearded man approached him and, without provocation, stabbed him in the abdomen, police said. He was transported to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

At around 10:25 a.m., Manhattan resident Chang Wang, 67, was fishing near the East River when he was stabbed multiple times in the abdomen. He was transported to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said

At around 10:55 a.m., a 36-year-old woman, Wilma Augustin, was stabbed multiple times in the chest and left arm near the United Nations headquarters, police said. She was transported to New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she later died from her injuries. She had an 8-year-old child, the mayor said.

“How do you explain to that child what happened?” Adams asked Tuesday.

Rivera allegedly told investigators he chose his victims because they were alone and distracted, according to a police official.

“No words exchanged. No property taken. Just attacked and stabbed viciously,” said Joseph Kenny, the NYPD’s chief of detectives.

A ‘complicated’ system needs fixing

Adams on Tuesday reiterated his call for the city to take those who were unable to care of themselves off the streets. He addressed critics of his policies, including a controversial directive two years ago allowing first responders to enforce a directive that empowers them to involuntarily commit people experiencing a mental health crisis. His administration has come under fire for dispatching police and health care workers into the subways to remove homeless people.

“We need to have stronger laws that allow what’s called involuntary removal. People who are a danger to themselves and a danger to others, we need to be able to take the action to involuntarily move them off the streets,” Adams told CNN on Thursday.

Manhattan City Councilman Erik Bottcher lamented that his constituents have grown “tired of hearing about how broken the system is. They’re tired of hearing about how complicated this is.”

“They know it’s broken. They know it’s complicated. They want it fixed,” he told CNN.

The problem is not getting homeless people off the streets, it’s getting them into psychiatric beds at a time when those services are shrinking across the state, according to advocates.

“We can’t continue with this Whac-A-Mole type of approach that we’re just going to step up NYPD presence in the subways or, you know, send NYPD out with outreach teams, unless you have the long-term psychiatric beds,” Brosnahan said. “Until we start addressing this systematically, nothing’s going to change.”

Kim Hopper, a medical anthropologist and Columbia University professor who has spent decades studying homelessness and mental illness in New York, said Monday’s killing spree “sounds like one of those instances where some guy winds up out of care, out of luck and out of choices.”

“We’ve just seen this over and over and over again. It’s a whole rotten system,” Hopper told CNN.

“To pin responsibility on any one of these sort of agents or agencies, none of them are equipped with the resources or the placement opportunities they need to pull it off effectively,” he said. “And so, I mean, it’s not surprising that they try and, you know, shuttle it to the next possible option. But it’s a pretty miserable set of circumstances they’re being asked to work with.”

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CNN’s Nic F. Anderson, Melissa Alonso, Sabrina Souza, Artemis Moshtaghian, Mark Morales and Zachary B. Wolf contributed to this report.