Before the paths of Jason Volz and Carlton McPherson collided in a terrible moment on a Harlem subway platform on Monday, their lives had seemed to be heading in opposite directions.
Mr. McPherson had been hospitalized at least half a dozen times since last year for mental health treatment, according to someone who has seen some of his medical records. A neighbor in the Bronx said he sometimes slept in a hallway closet in his grandmother’s building because she would not let him into her apartment. Last October, a man whom prosecutors believe to be Mr. McPherson — he had the same name and birth year — was charged with beating a Brooklyn homeless shelter employee with a cane.
Mr. Volz, 54, was recovering from addiction and had also endured homelessness, but had gotten sober two years ago and had just moved into a new apartment, his ex-wife said.
On Monday night, the police say, Mr. McPherson, 24, walked up to Mr. Volz on the uptown platform of the 125th Street station on Lexington Avenue and shoved him in front of an oncoming No. 4 train.
Responding police officers, who had been on another part of the platform, found him lifeless beneath the train. His death was a recurrence of the ultimate New York City nightmare, and another example of the difficulty of preventing violence on the subway despite years of efforts by state and city authorities to keep people struggling with severe mental illness out of the transit system.
Mayor Eric Adams, who has watched crime in the subway largely defy his attempts to rein it in, sounded a note of defeat on Tuesday, acknowledging that the presence of police officers had not been enough to stop Monday’s attack.
“When you’re dealing with a severe mental health crisis or if you want to participate in criminal behavior,” he said at a news conference, “we have now reached a point where we have those so emboldened by that they can keep doing their actions, that the uniform no longer means anything.”
Mr. Adams’s tenure has been challenged over and over by spasms of subway violence and the broken system for helping homeless people with serious mental illness.
He had been in office for only two weeks in January 2022 when a woman named Michelle Go was pushed in front of a train in Times Square by a homeless man suffering from schizophrenia. The man had been hospitalized more than 20 times and discharged without being stabilized. The next month, Mr. Adams announced an aggressive plan to evict homeless people from the subway system.
Later that year, after months of increased crime in the subway, Mr. Adams declared that the city would begin taking mentally ill people to hospitals involuntarily if they were too sick to care for themselves, even if they posed no immediate threat to others.
Gov. Kathy Hochul has also made repeated efforts to tame violence and homelessness in the subway and to help mentally ill homeless people get psychiatric treatment. And both leaders periodically flood the subway with law enforcement personnel — city and state police officers and National Guard soldiers — to reassure anxious commuters.
The state and city say that over the past two years they have moved more than a thousand homeless people out of the subway and into shelters, hospitals or housing. New policies have instructed city and state public hospitals to keep homeless psychiatric patients until they are truly stabilized. And yet the problems persist.
In the last quarter of 2021, just before Mr. Adams took office, there were 1,766 unsheltered people on the city’s social-service caseload whom outreach workers had first encountered in the subway. By the last quarter of 2023, that number had doubled, to 3,527.
While surveys show that fears about crime are high, the data paint a mixed picture about whether the subway has become more dangerous in recent years. Rates of some crimes, including felony assault, have risen above prepandemic levels. But major crime also decreased in 2023, before ticking up again so far this year compared with the same period last year.
Last fall, the city and state unveiled another initiative to send teams of clinicians paired with police officers into the subway in Manhattan to involuntarily remove mentally ill people who appear to be in crisis.
In the first 80 days of the teams’ operation, they took 15 people to hospitals for psychiatric reasons, said Brian Stettin, the mayor’s senior adviser for severe mental illness. Another 15 people were hospitalized for medical issues, he said. The governor recently announced plans to expand the operation.
Mr. Stettin said on Tuesday that part of the stubbornness of the problem is that some mentally ill people resist treatment.
“We had a couple of frustrations with people who have been stabilized to where we could not keep them at the hospital any longer,” he said, “but who have refused placements, refused the connections we have tried diligently to make for them for outpatient care, and they are back out there in a way that it will not shock me if we see them again.”
He said subway riders “are right to be concerned, and it is very disturbing to see somebody in psychiatric crisis on a train.” But he urged them to bear in mind that “this is a system that has been neglected for decades, and it’s not an immediate turnaround.”
Philip Yanos, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said on Tuesday that approaches to untreated mental illness that involve coercion and police involvement were doomed to fail. “Why would a person with a gun make you want to engage?” he said.
Mr. Volz’s ex-wife, Anna Torres, said in a phone interview that his death “seems like such a waste.” She added: “This is crazy, because he survived the pandemic, survived being homeless. He got better, he got clean and everything was working.”
As for Mr. McPherson, his mother, Octavia Scouras, said on the phone that she “did everything possible so this child would have a better life.” She said he had been raised by his paternal grandmother from a young age and was hospitalized for mental illness in his teens, but had continued to struggle. “The whole situation is extremely sad,” she wrote in a text message.
His brushes with the law go back to his adolescence, too. The Bronx district attorney’s office said that a Carlton McPherson with the same birth date and address, whom the office believed to be the same person, was charged at age 16 with assaulting another teenager after punching him in the face with brass knuckles and fracturing his nose.
At his grandmother’s apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, a man who lived on the same floor, Marco Paredes, said he had watched Mr. McPherson deteriorate dramatically after his grandfather died a couple of years ago.
“The grandfather was like the authority figure, so when he died, he kind of went off and his grandma couldn’t control him,” Mr. Paredes, 46, said.
He said Mr. McPherson broke windows in the lobby and had damaged the internet wiring in the building because he was frustrated that his grandmother would not let him into her home. He would pace the hallway talking to himself, Mr. Paredes added. “One time I caught him on the roof, just walking around in a square.”
Claire Fahy, Hurubie Meko and Liset Cruz contributed reporting.