Elizabeth Whitcomb said she was walking down Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, one evening this past spring when she noticed a man walking right beside her.
“Then he just grabbed my shoulders all of a sudden and pushed me,” she said.
Whitcomb, who was too nervous to look back, kept walking.
She said that although she wasn’t physically hurt, she was confused, overwhelmed and shaken up.
The next morning, Whitcomb posted about what happened to her on a Greenpoint Reddit thread. She described the man’s appearance after someone asked what he looked like. Soon, several people responded, describing similar encounters with the same man.
That’s when Whitcomb realized the seemingly random shove on the street wasn’t so random after all.
Court records show the man who pushed Whitcomb currently faces charges ranging from harassment and menacing to assault and illegal possession of a knife. He has also been accused of groping and assaulting women on the north side of the neighborhood and is on the state’s sex offender registry for forcible touching and sexual abuse convictions in 2017 and 2021. He denied the most recent charges against him at a recent court appearance and said there was “no evidence.”
According to city officials, the man has gone to jail and psychiatric hospitals dozens of times. He has started and stopped treatment for alcoholism, according to court papers. He’s also deaf. And he and his mother say that, like half of the people in city jails, he has mental illness.
Across New York City, stories like this one play out every day, as the city grapples with worsening mental health and addiction crises. Some high-profile incidents make headlines. But smaller, day-to-day encounters can also erode New Yorkers’ sense of safety and expose the systemic failures that allow people to fall through the cracks.
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