Daniel Johnson 2

What should be done to help these neighborhoods? What programs should be implemented and by whom? Can you draw from any examples, textbook or real life, of such programs helping another neighborhood.

-5 Pages, Double Spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt. Font.

Examples of theories: social strain, theories by functionalist (Durkheim), Karl Marx, Etc. you select which one to apply.

The Gang War That Wasn't

A Far Rockaway murder lit the fuse of a longstanding conflict, but a remarkable peace arrived instead

ByAlbert Samaha published: •August 07, 2013

The bullet hit the young man in the chest. He staggered down the building's dim hallway, stumbling through an' apartméflt door. He collapsed on the floor.

Two residents, already roused by the crack of a gunshot in the small hours of the morning, rushed to him. One called •911. The other crouched to hold the young man, pleading with him to keep his eyes open.

They knew this kid. Most everybody at the Redfern

x.ouses in Far Rockaway knew Ramel Gittens.

His friends called him "Rowdy." The Square-jawed 19year-old had a life-of-the-party way about him. Gittens

•had been a star running back and point guard at Far Rockaway High School. He carried himself with the confidence of a prom king.

It was a good bet he was some of his folks earlier that Saturday night, July 16, 2011.. He'd reached his building at the front of the Redfern complex around 1•.25 a.m.. But held barely made it into the hallway when the shot fired.

Now he fought for every breath while summoning a final surge of stren.gth.

"Jigga shot me," he said.

The residents knew this man, too; Redfern, after all, is an intimate setting.

The housing project is nestled between Motts Basin and a construction company's storage lot at the eastern edge of Queens County. It's a 10-minute walk to the.A train's last stop. "If you don't have a car, you can't get far," says Doris Jacobs, a 30-year •resident. "We're the forgotten borough. "

So people Stay. Generation upon generation grows roots in these nine six- and Seven-story brick structures.

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"There's this mindset that people who are born here, stay here," Says Denean Ferguson, vice president of the

New York Police Department's 101st Precinct

Community Council and a 20-year Far Rockaway local. 'YAnd a lot of the times, kids grow up not exposed to the world outside the peninsula."

The residents had known Jigga for years. When the police arrived, they told the offcers his government name: Shawn Jones: The name should have been familiar.

In 20071 the 24-year-old Jones was arrested in a sweep of 34 suspected gang members in Far Rockaway. He spent two years in prison for illegal possession of loaded handguns.

Jones had been on the other side of the barrel as well. At 17, he and two friends were shot while standing outside a house party. He reached the hospital in critical condition, but managed to survive. The two friends died at the scene.

Jones also survived the most serious criminal accusations against him. Irr 2006, he was chåged with shooting a man at Redfern. A month later, while out on bail, he was arrested again after seven men jumped and pistol-whipped a guy at the back of thé complex. He beat both cases.

The back of Redfern was Jigga's turf. And as long as he'd been alive, the boys from the back of the project had feuded with those from the front. The back flew the flag of the Bloods; the front repped the Crips. The animosity between them laced Redfernts air like a gas leak, forever on the verge of combustion.

"It's like the Hatfields and the McCoys," says Manny Fiallo, an outreach coordinator for the Police Athletic League. Others said it was more "like the Civil War.'

Jones knew this war well. Just the night before, he was walking through the front, the shortest path to the bus stop, the bodega, the grocery store, and the Mott Avenue fast-food joints. He passed a group of guys. They said something. Hé said something back. Someone threw punch. Next thing he knew, the whole group was pounding him.

But he wasn't the type to cower in his 01A}-n neighborhood. Barely 24 hours after the•beating, Jones was across the street from Gittens's building. It was 1:45 a.m., 20 minutes after the shooting. A cop spotted him', He didn't run. The officer asked him where he'd been. Jones said he'd been out the entire night. Police would arrest him the following evening.

Around the corner, red and blue emergency lights flashed. Some residents peeked out windows. Others gathered in the courtyard to speculate. They shook their heads. It had•been so quiet here for so long.. Now•they wondered if this single bullet had sparked a fuse that had lain unlit for years.

Oh, Lord, sighed one older woman. Don't let it happen again.

The cops lined the back of the church, not wanting to disrupt the funeral. Others sat in squad cars outside Macedonia Baptist. The i 01st Precinct understood the implications of Ramel Gittens•ls murder.

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Ih&p.hundred or so people packed the pews. Many were comforted by the police presence.

Rumors had spread about the shooting. As far as anyone knew, Gittens Wasn!t there when Jones got jumped. One theory was that Jones targeted him to settle a decades-old score. The story went •that Gittens's father. had snitched out Jones's uncle' when the pair worked together a' drug dealers 20 or so years ago.

But others claimed the•killing was random. Gittens associated VHth the Hassocc Boys, a set named for the street at the entrance of the complex. Jones ran Viith the • 11 1270 Gangbangers, named for the address of a building at the back. Speeulation was that Jones entered •Hassoec territory in a rage over the beating he took, vowing to shoot the next person who walked through the door.

Yet, at this moment, motive didn't matter. All that mattered was the boiling anger inside the church. Young men hed pews wearing "Hassocc in Peace Rowdy G" T-shirts and "R.I.P. Rowdy" buttons. Some held their heads high and balled their fists; clenched jaws fortifying s_teely expressions. Some allowed' themselves tears, and wept. Some shout.ed curses on the

sidewalk and pledged to make those behind Gittens's death feel the same pain.

Gittens's father stepped to the front. He demanded that the violence end Viith his son. There was sorrowin his voice. We're not gon' do this, he said. I'll be damned ifI'm gon' have this

nonsense. He recognized the powder keg Redfern had become. Everyone in the room remembered the last time Redfern exploded.

It began with the most infamous murder in the project's history. Around 5 a.m. oh July 11, 2007, Raquan Elliott entered his building at the front of the complex. The 24-year-old rapper was better know'll as Stack Bundles. He'd recently signed with Dipset, the nationally acclaimed hip-hop crew. He was sure to be the first Far Rock rapper to go big.

Elliott was shot dead before he reached his apartment door. His family suspected someone from inner circle. Someone jealous. Nö one was ever charged with the killing.

Six months later, 18-year-old Neville Ward was gunned down in front of Redfern. boys, ages 13 and 15, were charged •xMth the slaying.

Yet the powder keg wasn't fully lit until May 2008. More than two dozen people had gathered near the back of Redfern for a graduation party. At 11 :10 p.m., two men opened fire, unloading nearly 30 rounds. A 15-year-old girl named Brandon Bethea was killed.

Two days later, 16-year-old Tyresé Johnson walked into Last Stop Deli, f01rblocks south of Redfern. •He was fatally •shot at the doorway. Police said it was a Case of mistaken identity.

The burst of violence was enough to draw the New York Times. At Redfern, the paper reported, 'mourning the murdered has become a familiar routine.'

The usual response, wrote Marc Santora, was "vengeance." Most of the dead "are victims of a private war that has been playing out at this housing project for years. A war over money, turf, and drugs.

This wasn't quite true. The beefs ran deeper than business. They were perspnal, minor conflicts that escalated to .tragedy. All it took was a spark.

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Bethea's murder brought public outrage. A shuttered .community center was re- opened. Policé increased patrols. Politicians secured funding for security cameras. Community leaders . promoted neighborhood events like "Family Day" and the. "Celebrate Rockaway" parade.

För three years, there was relative peace; Residents allowed their children to play outdoors more often. Elderly folks left their rooms to socialize on the benches. Teens played basketball at 3 a.m. Redfern had reached some.measure of tranquility. "You almost don't wanna say anything because you don't wanna jinx it," says Jonathan Gaska, district manager of the local community board.

But now that peace felt fragile. Many in the church closed their eyes and prayed. A menace had been unleashed.

"People knew that it might pop off," Ferguson says.

'"Uh oh, here we go again," Gaska says he thought. "There are times w.hen it's super- quiet, and then something happens and there's retaliations back and forth and it's just horrible.

"Everybody was thinking it was going to be retaliation," says Janay Hill, a 23-year- oldRedfern native. "Everybody wanted retaliation."

Reverend Earl Gray took the lectern. He preached to the young men before him, asking how high the body count would rise before they stopped kffng each other.

But as Gray spoke, six young men stood up and defiantly marched out the door.

"Marcus" was heated. He stood outside his building and contemplated his next move, his anger building by the moment.

It had been three months since Gittens's slaying. Jones had had an arraignment that day. With it had comé the first sign of revenge.

One of Jones's relatives was crossing a street with her five-year-old son. A car accelerated toward them. Mother and child leaped from harm. The Woman swore the driver was a Gittens.

Marcus was cool with Jones. He lived in the middle of the complex but affiliated with the back. And'he had the power to back up his outrage.

Just 22, he'd risen to become a shot-caller at Redfern as the older guys moved away or went to jail. He was charismatic and handsome, flashing designer labels like Burberry and YSL. Friends dubbed his style "hood-preppy" and joked that he looked like 'he should be hosting 106 & Park.

His climb wasntt a product of chance. He built a network of ållies. VVhen anything happened..at Redfern, he was among the first to hear about it.

And so he fumed. He believed that targeting a mother and child was spitting on the unwritten rules of the game. He would prepare for payback.

But the sight of Ralph Greer Jr. interrupted his thoughts. Marcus wasn't surprised to see the man headed his way.. Greer was an outreach worker for Snug, an anti-violence initiative modeled after Chicago's CeaseFire program. Greer's job was to defuse conflict before it erupted.

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The men slapped hands and hugged. Then Marcus unleashed a tirade. He cursed those responsible for the near hit-and-run, arms slicing the air to punctuate his fury.

Greer nodded silently. He believed in letting•a man vent.

It would be fair to call Greer an expert on project life. For nearly a decadé, he'd overseen summer- and after-school programs at projects around Queens. But each neighborhood has its own politics. Neither Greer nor Lance and Todd Feurtado, the brothers who ran Snug, were fröm Redfern.

They'd arrived not long after Gittens's body was cold. Before they. could defuse-the •bomb, though, they first had to understand its wfring. So they hit the streets nightly, learning the conflicts, the teams, who wasprone to play the hothead, who was likely to become the peacemaker. So far, there had been a few minor confrontations, but no serious violence.

It seemed a scab formed over the wound of Gittens's death. But something about Jones's court appearanée that day had ripped it off.

Marcus knew all about Greer and his bosseS, the Feurtados. Oldest brother 'Tony Feurtado had been the top dog of the Seven Crowns gang. Lance. and Todd were his capos, with Greer as their right-hand man. He was the enforcer. He collected the bills. He moved the shipments in his - trunk.

For much of the '80s, the Feurtados controlled South Jamaica, Queens. They supplied the community with riarcotics and Thanksgiving turkeyS. By the early '90s, their.conglomerate spanned 23 states. The Times called Seven Crovvns "a sophisticated, million-dollar- a-week drug enterprise that operated ruthlessly and flagrantly."

Then came the law; After a 1995 bust, Tony got a 22-year sentence. Lance and Todd each spent a decade locked up. Greer did nine years. It was plenty of time to -reflect on the poison tlgey had injected into their communities. They committed to repairing the darnege they helped cause.

Greer knew he couldn't change Marcus's mind with some "do the rightthing" lecture. When somebody tries. to run.over a five-year-old boy, murder might feel like the right thing to do. Instead, Greer played the self-interest card.

He asked Marcus whether he liked women, because you can't get with women in the joint. You spread your cheeks and cough. Live in a cramped cell. Shower with other men. Eat the same shitty food and wear the same shitty jumpsuit for years on end.

He pressed Marcus about his infant daughter. Was it OK to miss her birthdays? Her graduation? Her wedding?

But Greer's .most valuable tool was patience. He just had to keep Marcus talking. He knew that you couldn't talk a man out of his anger. You could only let him burn until his furnace began to cool. And he •Wouldn't leave until he was sure Marcus would keep the peace.

•Marcus's rage would temper. Then reheat. The pattern continued deep into the night. One minute he was gushing about his baby girl. The next, he was promising to make those boys from the front pay.

It wasn't until a little past 2 a.m. that Greer heard what he needed to hear: Marcus told him that

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everything would be all right. The men hugged and parted ways.

A fewweeks later, a car nearly hit the same woman and her five-year-old son as they crossed the street in front of Redfern.

"Yo, it's about to go down, " the middle-aged woman told Greer.

It was November; and Greer was making his rounds.- The woman had flagged him down. Tensions had been partiéularly high since the second car incident. She led Greer to the front of Redfern.

Two groups of teenagers squared off. They stood several yards apart, trading smack talk. A couple of guys on each side held baseball bats. Greer knew most of these boys. At least four carried pistols.

Greer stepped between the boys and put his hands up: He pulled aside the leader of each group and walked them to a nearby rec center. The other boys dispersed.

The trio sat at a conference table, where Greer offered a proposal: They would deal with this like men, one on one, face to face.

The boys mugged at each other. One lived in the front. The other lived in the back. Their sides had been feuding as long as they could remember. Neither knew when, how, or why the sections first started beefing. Nobody did.

'It's passed down from generation to generation," says Lance Feurtado. A kid's loyalties came down to where he was raised, a war inherited before he was born. The roots were untraceable. But over the years they. had snarled into a thicket of blame. Each side felt slighted by an act of aggression from the other. A guy on one side got jumped. A guy on the other side got shot. And on and on.

"These feuds go back probably as old as I am," says Donovan 30-:year-old city councilman representing southeast Queens.

Most of the fights Snug encountered started small. Someone flirted with somebody else's girl. Someone talked shit on Facebook•. Someone looked the wrong way at somebody else.

The disputes mirrored those of any teenage population. Except thése kids had guns in their waistbands, anger in their hearts, and the nothing-to-lose attitude of those who can't see a viable path around poverty and incarceration.

Then there was the fear. The fear that the other guy would shoot first.

The boys explained to Greer .that a group from the front was hanging out in the courtyard as a group from•the back walked past, mean mugging. That set it off. People shouted and ran to grab bats.

Greer had them trace back the standoff.

"You're gonna tell•.me you're gonna let a look, a stare on a face, get to you?" he said to one of the boys. "M7hy would you let another person dictate your character?"

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was no need for somebody else to get killed, somebody else to get locked up.

Then he turned to the other leader. He reminded him that people were still upset. He asked him fo be sensitive to that. Because gunplay can happen with the snap of a finger.

The teens nodded. The three of them talked for more than three.hours until they were calm.

Janay Hill saw the group of guys huddled at the front of Redfern. She sensed trouble.

•"M7hen you grow up with somebody, you already just know," she says.

It was February. Nerves had begun to Settle, but the ongoing tension lingered. "After the second car-crash incident, almost all the confrontations were related to the murder," says Greef.

Earlier in the day, Hil noticed a Facebook.post that would raise tempers. "Jennifer," a prim 26year-old With the demeanor of a reality show diva, posted a status that read, "at the end of the day, 1 dovm, 4 to go.'

It seemeda taunt about the Gittens murder, with the threat of more to come. "Becky," a 25year-old who carried herself like a back-of-the-classroom spitballer,• took her outrage over the post to the boys from the front. Now they were plotting retribution for Jennifer's offense.

Hill had never taken Sides in the front-versus-back divide. That didn't mean she wore a halo. She had a reputation as a hothead, and she didn't shy away from a fight. Greer had mediated at least one of her squabbles.

After a couple months of seeing Greer around the complex, Hill told him that she appreciated his efforts to stop the violence. But what she really needed was a job. The Feurtados hired her at

This wasn't a charity hire. Hill was ideal for the position. She knew the dynamics. of the neighborhood. She wasn't.just some square preaching anti-violence. She was one of them.

Now she was on the •other side of the mediation process. She knewthat girls at Redfern had a gift for setting the boys tö boil. "Girls have a lot of influence on what these guys do.

And just as a woman can push a man to violence, a woman can pull him back from the edge. Pretty and amiable, Hill lightly flirted with them. Their aggression soothed. Their guards dropped. Let her handle the two' girls; she added.

Hill understands the nature of gang violence—the obligation to protect reputations and send a message that any attack may come a.lethal cost. If you and your people get punked and don't do anything about it, wörd quickly spreads that you're -the gazelles of the savanna. As one Far Rock teen puts it, "Sometimes it's just like better for people to think you're thé pre4ator than the prey, you know?'

Hill was giving the guys an out: It wasn't their call to back down. They were only doing her a favor.

"That'll be her first pass," one of the guys told her. "But we ain't gonf give her anqther.

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They hadn't forgotten about Ramel Gittens. They still wore T-shirts with his name and buttons with his face.. They still posted messages on the "R.i.P Ramel GittENS AKA Rowdy" memorial Facebook page. A couple of guys recorded a rap about him. Scores of people came out for the video shoot:

But this beef wasn't about Gittens. This time someone from the back allegedly spit in the face of someone's sister. Greer arrived in time to defuse it.

In the 362 days following Gittens's murder, not a single person was shot at Redfern. The combustible ingredients for gang warfare were all there. There was rage. Pledges of revenge. Standoffs. But there was no gun violence. The anger vented and the furnace cooled.

'Quite frankly, I was very pleasantly shocked that it just didn't go back and fortlf, 't says Gaska, the community board director.

The Feurtados t team arrived at the height of the tension. They stayed more than 11 months, watching that tension .fall and rise before finally settling down.

"They came and did a lot for the young adults," says Joyce Turner, who's lived in Redfern livéd for 35 years. "They went in hard. "

Snug mediated about 70 conflicts. Lance Feurtado estimates that at least a third of those directly or indirectly stemmed from the murder. Without the mediation "it woulda been ugly,' says .Hill•. "It would have been outrageous."

"Just from that killing, might have been 20, 30 bodies out there," says Todd Feurtado. "And the killing might still be going on today."

Snug's funding dried up in June of last year. The Feurtados were forced to leave.

On July .14, 2012, three days before the first anniversary of Ramel Gittens's death, a 22-yearold was shot near the front of Redfern. He survived. The incident stemmed from a personal beef

unrelated to the murder. The streak of no shooting victims was broken.

But the truce between front and back was sturdier than that. In the year since, there has been peace at Redfern.

[email protected]

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A Bronx Precinct Where Killings Persist

The death of a woman at the Mott Haven Houses in the 40th Precinct reveals a swirl of deeper dysfunction.

By BENJAMIN MUELLER and AL BAKERFEB. 1 8, 2016

The sfrangers slept no more than a dozen steps apart in a housing project in the South Bronx — she on a cot pushed up against the wall in the living room of her ailing mother's apartment, and he in a narrow, airless hallway of the building, on the threshold of his family's door.

She worried he had been locked out of his apartment, and one day last month told her mother she wanted to offer him some soup. But the mother, mindful of the danger that faces residents in the stairwells and expansive courtyards of the Mott Haven Houses, warned her it was the kind of encounter that could get her killed.

A few days later, the man, Angel Feliz-Volquez, 26, hearing her in the fifth-floor hallway, burst from his apartment with a 20-inch machete and repeatedly struck the younger woman, Carmen Torres-Gonzalez, 59. He sliced her neck, face, shoulder and forearm, the back of her head and both her hands, severing one, and then stood over her, according to a police report.

Ms. Torres-Gonzalez's killing ü7as the first of 2016 in the 40th Precinct, a two-square-mile area at the southern tip of the Bronx where the towers of 14 housing projects dominate the skyline, methadone clinics dot the main thoroughfares, and gangs and drug-dealing wane with each police roundup and then roar back.

report

"Psychotic Disorder," detectives wrote in their initial investigative killing, adding that Mr. Feliz-Volquez was a "diagnosed schizophrenic

Murder in the 4-0

To understand how murder lives on in a city that has seen crime fall to historic lows, The New York Times is examining the life and death of each person whose murder is recorded this year in the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx.

But the murder sprang from a swirl of deeper dysfunction, from a public-housing system that remains a redoubt for the sort of serious crime that once plagued much of New York City, and from a string of government encounters that failed to keep Mr. Feliz-Volquez from hurting more people as his mental health deteriorated.

Entrenched violence in housing projects and uneven, ineffective services for mentally ill poor people are among the stubborn causes of what killings remain in an era of historically low crime, spurring intense but often frustrating efforts by the police to identify and track the most violent and most vulnerable.

Some police precincts now routinely log no killings in a given year. Citywide, plummeted to 333 in 2014, the lowest since comparable statistics started to be kept a half-century ago, from a peak of 2,262 in 1990 when crack-cocaine drove so much of the city's violence.

The 40th Precinct, though, remains one of a few areas where homicides have persisted, feeding off the isolation of poverty and turf rivalries among criminal crews that linger despite the neighborhood's progress in undoing some of its history as an emblem of urban blight. In the neighborhoods that make up the precinct — Melrose, Mott Haven and Port Morris — nine people were murdered last year; the precinct recorded the biggest increase in the city in major crimes. This year, all three city police officers who have been shot were struck amid the precinct's housing projects. They all survived.

To understand how and why killings continue in a city that has seen crime fall to historic lows, The New York Times is reporting this year on violence in the 40th Precinct, and documenting the story of each homicide.

Photo

Ms. Torres-Gonzalez.' Her killing was the first of 2016 in the 40th Precinct.

A Neighborhood in Transition

Sixty years after the predominantly Irish area was transformed by blacks and Puerto Ricans moving into new housing projects, it now faces the specter of another overhaul as developers buy up once-industrial waterfront property for luxury towers.

But the vast tracts of public housing are not going away, and residents still speak of routines shaped by day-to-day violence whose victims they say are often ignored — among them undocumented immigrants, many from Mexico, who worry about coming forward to report crime. Homicides in the precinct reached 21 in 2011, after hovering between eight and 16 for a decade before that, and then dropped to 12 in 2012, eight in 2013 and seven in 2014 before rising again last year.

Roughly a third of the precinct's 95,000 residents live in public housing, and data show that people who live in those buildings and on their edges are packed almost twice as. densely as residents of the precinct over all. The 15th Congressional District, which includes the area, is the poorest in the United States.

"Housing and gangs," said Robert K. Boyce, the Police Departrnent's chief of detectives, who led the 40th Precinct from 2000 to• 2002. "Each housing development has its own little gang or crew."

For people who live there and watch friends fall victim to crime, fear has remained a fact of life

across

generations.

The authorities removing Ms. Torres-Gonzalez's body from the apartment complex. Credit Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

But Ms. Torres-Gonzalez, who earned a secretarial degree in Puerto Rico before moving in the 1980s to the Bronx, where she taught Spanish to children, fried not to be intimidated by such fears. In a building where tenants are often afraid to open their doors for strangers, Ms. TorresGonzalez was a confident presence, coaxing neighbors out with food or a favor.

Since her 77-year-old mother came out of a coma two years ago, Ms. Torres-Gonzalez stayed with her each night, cooking sorullos — fried cornmeal sticks — and helping her get around. During the day, she visited grieving families at nearby hospitals — her own husband died from cancer 20 years ago — and prepared gift boxes for a church group that supported victims of domestic violence.

She had been battling lung cancer for about a year but did not tell many people, including her two daughters, because she did not want to burden them. She went to Bible study each Saturday at a storefront church, Ministerio Sefior y Rey, reciting her favorite Scripture, Jeremiah 29: 1 1 : 'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. "'

Continue reading the main story

'She had a very strong voice," said Carmen Martinez, 85, a neighbor, recalling how Ms. TorresGonzalez banged on her triple-locked door with a half-bowl of salami soup on the morning of the killing. "She wasn't as timid as I am."

Ms. Torres-Gonzalez's voice became a preoccupation of Mr. Feliz-VoIquez, who told the police after his arrest that he heard her calling his name in the middle of the night and talking about him. He told investigators he thought she and an upstairs neighbor had been spying on him. He is now at the Rikers Island jail complex after being charged with second-degree murder; Amy Attias, his court-appointed lawyer, said she had asked for a psychiafric exam.

A Look at the 40th Precinct

The southernmost police precinct in the Bronx has the largest public-housing population in the city.

WESTCHESTER AVE. Park Houses ST. MARY'S

Bronxchester Patterson PARK

Houses Houses Mitchel

John Betances

Houses

Mott

Adams Houses

Mill Brook

Houses

Port Morris

It was not the first time he had heard voices that others say were not there. In March, he was charged with cracking a plate over the head of a manager at a Manhattan restaurant where he worked. He told the authorities that his co-workers were talking about him when they thought he was not listening, several co-workers briefed on his statements said.

"To me, that's evidence something's going on inside this person's mind that's not real," one coworker, Colin Bryson, said.

Mr. Feliz-Volquez was ordered to complete seven days of community service and an angermanagement program. His contact with the authorities only increased, though. Since June, his erratic behavior had drawn at least four visits by the authorities, a law enforcement official said. Each time he was taken for observation to Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center.

"This may very well have been able to be avoided," Ms. Attias said of the killing. She added that Mr. Feliz-VoIquez's "family had been looking for help and in some ways the system was aware of the existence of this problem well before this poor woman was killed."

A Downward Spiral

Mr. Feliz-Volquez, who was born in the Dominican Republic, used to speak of wanting to be a professional volleyball player, his grandmother, Maria Matos, said. He loved going to Citi Field to watch baseball. He studied hard at Walton High School in the Bronx, and took a job at McDonald's to help his single mother with the rent, Ms. Matos said.

The door to Angel Feliz-Volquez's fifth-floor aparånent. Credit Benjamin Mueller/The New York Times

In 2012, he began teaching soccer at Children's Village, a community center for at-risk children in Westchester County.

"The Angel that I knew, there was not anything wrong with him," said Carlos Cuevas, a coworker there who grew up with Mr. Feliz-Volquez in the Dominican Republic. "He was a quiet guy, a very respectful guy, a great guy."

Ms. Matos said his mental illness surfaced about a year ago, when he told his mother that he could not sleep and had stopped eating or drinking anything but lots of coffee. Clothes started sagging off his 6-foot-l frame.

"I think it was the depression that got him," Ms. Matos said.

A family friend from Mr. Feliz-Volquez's church got him a job as a dishwasher at Asia de Cuba in downtown Manhattan. A few nights after its grand opening, a manager, Felipe Murcia, was scraping dirty dishes into the garbage.

Then the room went black. When he came to, Mr. Murcia was staggering backward, blood dripping from a gash on his forehead that required 35 stitches. Shattered plates lay on the floor, and Mr. Bryson subdued Mr. Feliz-Volquez.

A memorial service for Ms. Torres-Gonzalez at Thessalonica Christian Church in the Bronx.

Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

"Why'd you do this?" Mr. Bryson recalled asking.

"You know what you do," he said Mr. Feliz-Volquez replied.

All that his co-workers had done, they said, was invite him to meals, only to be rebuffed. He

refused to speak Spanish, and insisted that his Dominican co-workers use the English

pronunciation of Angel, rather

than

the

When one employee fried to introduce herself, Mr. Feliz-Volquez answered, "My name is no name."

After the attack, Mr. Bryson and the chef, Brendan Mica, barricaded him inside the room, only to watch as Mr. Feliz-VoIquez changed into street clothes and waited for the police.

N,fr. Feliz-Volquez was charged with felony second-degree assault for hitting Mr. Murcia with a

plate. In August, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge; Mr. Murcia said prosecutors told him they could not prove that Mr. Feliz-Volquez had used a plate.

Mr. Murcia said doctors told him the wound must have been caused by a hard object. He said prosecutors did not question him thoroughly, emphasizing that Mr. Feliz-Volquez had no record and suggesting that Mr. Murcia must have provoked the attack. Mr. Murcia now questions whether prosecutors could have done more to pursue 'the felony assault charges against Mr. Feliz-Volquez.

"I felt like they didn't really do the job, and they were just lingering around with this case," Mr. Murcia said. "If they would have put a little more pressure, or this guy would have ended up in jail, this would not have happened to this woman."

Improving Delivery of Help

Mr. Mica said he told prosecutors that Mr. Feliz-Volquez needed psychiatric help, and Mr.

Bryson recalled telling prosecutors that there was no way to explain Mr. Feliz-Volquez' s "unfpunded hostility. '

"It's mysterious no one seemed to take that seriously," Mr. Bryson said.

Mental illness was not raised publicly by Mr. Feliz-VoIquez's defense or prosecutors, according to court records and a transcript of his plea hearing. Asked about the prosecutors' handling of the case, Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney, said the office would continue to support second chances, particularly for first-time offenders. But, she said, "prosecutors do not have a crystal ball and there is always the possibility that someone may re-offend."

There is no indication that Mr. Feliz-Volquez is among the 78 New Yorkers the city has started to track for their history of mental illness and violence, said the law enforcement official who described his contact with the authorities.

Sarah Solon, a spokeswoman for the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, said the tracking system, known as the hub, was still taking shape after its formation in August and has been operating only by referral.

Residents outside the Melrose Houses as the police investigated the shooting of two officers in the 40th Precinct in the Bronx this month. Credit Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

"The next stage, now that we've learned some lessons about how to do this well, is to work with all of the different agencies to figure out cases like Angel's, I think, where a red flåg should be raised," she said.

Social workers for the New York City Housing Authority are charged with helping some psychiatric patients returning home from hospitalizations, most of whom are not a threat, though the risk of violence increases when a person is off medication and psychotic. But residents said it remained difficult for social workers or the police to monitor what was happening within the four walls of a home, especially in housing projects where people feel isolated from comrnunity programs and jobs. Many tenants yearn for stronger interventions by the city.

"People are very frustrated about the lack of services," said John Johnson, the president of the tenant association at the Mott Haven Houses. "People are very, very frustrated with crime.'

The details of Mr. Feliz-Volquez's medical treatment are confidential, but his grandmother said he spent at least three days at the hospital on his first visit, which she thought was mainly related to insomnia. She worried about his being prescribed medication.

"I told him in the hospital he should try to sleep on his own rather than get accustomed to taking the pills," Ms. Matos said. "I said, 'Try to make an effort to sleep on your ovvn. ' He answered, 'Yes."'

She said his recovery was short-lived. One of the first signs was that Mr. Feliz-Volquez had stopped accompanying his mother to church on Sundays. Around Christmastime, he bought the machete on eBay, storing it under his bed, according to the police.

His apartment was five and a half linoleum tiles across from the door of Ms. Torres-Gonzalez's mother, at the end of the fifth-floor hallway.

Two days after the killing, splotches of dried blood stained those tiles. "Bastard!" a friend of Ms. Torres-Gonzalez screamed in the hallway, prefacing it with an expletive, her voice echoing off the walls.

Mr. Feliz-Volquez's door would later be tagged with graffiti reading "Killer" and "Justice will be served," but this was a day for a more baSIC task.

Another woman was on her hands and knees, a Lysol bottle in one hand and a green cloth in the other, scrubbing her friend's blood from the floor. A hallway light above flickered off before they went inside.

Reporting was contributed by Noah Remnick, Nate Schweber, Isvett Verde and Susan WeberStoger. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.