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Jordan Neely Was on New York’s ‘Top 50’ List of Homeless People at Risk


For years before Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless man, was killed in the subway, the city had its eye on him.

He was on a list informally known as the Top 50, a roster of people in a city of eight million who stand out for the severity of their troubles and their resistance to accepting help. The list is overseen by a task force of city agency workers and social-service nonprofits; when homeless-outreach workers see someone in the subway who is on the list, they are supposed to notify the city and try to get that person to a shelter.

Despite that, and an open arrest warrant, Mr. Neely was out on his own on May 1, when he began ranting at passengers. A Marine veteran, Daniel Penny, grabbed him and choked him to death; Mr. Penny has now been charged with manslaughter.

In the wake of Mr. Neely’s death, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams has been criticized by advocates for homeless people and left-leaning political opponents who say the killing highlights deep problems in the city’s support systems for homeless people and those with mental illness.

At a news conference on Thursday, Councilwoman Pierina Sanchez, referring to Mr. Neely’s presence on the list, said: “Our city knew exactly who Jordan was, where he was and what his history was. And yet we failed him.”

But as officials describe it, the task force and the Top 50 list were formed precisely for the people whom the system had failed time and again. The death of Mr. Neely, 30, who had been homeless for years, also shows the limits of the tools the task force has at its disposal and the difficulty of keeping track of people who are transient and elusive, let alone getting them to accept help.

In a speech this week, Mr. Adams called the group that maintains the list “the guiding force” behind the city’s efforts to help people like Mr. Neely “stabilize and heal from the ravages of homelessness and long-term, untreated psychosis.”

The goal of the list is to connect disparate bureaucracies across a vast city, in which a group of people with intense needs regularly interacts with hospital personnel, street social workers and police officers who do not regularly interact with each other.

The people on the list are among the city’s “most entrenched and chronic patients,” the mayor’s senior adviser for severe mental illness, Brian Stettin, said in an interview, and are discussed at weekly meetings of the task force.

The group that keeps the list, known formally as the Coordinated Behavioral Health Task Force, consists of workers from across city government, including the departments of Health, Homeless Services and Hospitals, along with representatives of the nonprofits that the city contracts with to try to connect homeless people to shelter and services, a process known as outreach.

At the weekly meetings, Mr. Stettin said, task force members exchange updates on the people on the list — “what their current needs seem to be” and in some cases “how their conditions have changed to the point where we have to start thinking about different ways we can approach their cases.”

Top 50 is a bit of a misnomer. The list does not have a fixed number of people on it, and there are actually two lists — one for people who typically stay in the subways and one for people who stay in the streets. People can be taken off the list for any number of reasons, including moving into housing or going to jail.

Mr. Neely was on the subway list, according to an employee of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a group that has the city contract to do outreach in the subways.

Outreach workers in the subways are supposed to be familiar with all the names on the subway list, said the Bowery Residents’ Committee employee, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

In February, Mr. Neely, who had been in jail on an assault charge for punching a 67-year-old woman and breaking several bones in her face, was released to a residential treatment program, under a plea deal that required him to avoid trouble for 15 months, stay on antipsychotic medication and not abuse drugs.

Two weeks later, he walked out of the facility and did not return, and the arrest warrant was issued.

In March, Mr. Neely was approached by homeless-outreach workers at a subway station in Manhattan. He was neatly dressed and calm and accepted a ride to a shelter in the Bronx where he spent the night, according to outreach records shared with The New York Times.



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