The Madman on the Ferry

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Just one day after the Liberty Weekend harbor festival, the ferry Samuel I. Newhouse was carrying some 500 passengers -- including a number of diehard tourists -- on its 8:30 a.m. run from Manhattan to Staten Island. Midway across New York harbor, just past the refurbished Statue of Liberty, a homeless Cuban refugee named Juan Gonzalez, 43, unsheathed a 2-ft. sword he had been carrying. Shouting incoherently, he began slashing and stabbing anybody who stood in his way. Retired New York City Police Officer Edward del Pino, 55, seeing panicky passengers stampeding past him on the ferry's deck, rushed inside in time to see Gonzalez slash a woman to death. Pino, en route home from his job as a security guard, pulled out a .38-cal. pistol and fired a shot into the air. Ordering Gonzalez to hit the deck, he warned him, "You move and you're dead!" But by then two were dead (a 61-year-old Staten Island man and a 71-year-old Manhattan woman) and nine wounded (including a touring couple from Kansas).

As the ferry docked, police seized Gonzalez and charged him with murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon (which had legally been sold to him for $22 by a Times Square souvenir shop). At the Staten Island police station the prisoner, who fled from Cuba in 1977 aboard a small boat, shouted, "The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit made me do it!" Authorities sent him to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn for psychiatric evaluation.

Only a few days earlier Gonzalez had undergone another psychiatric evaluation. After being observed on a street making wild threats ("I'm going to kill! God told me so!"), he had been taken to Manhattan's Presbyterian Hospital. Physicians concluded he had a "psychotic paranoid disorder," but released him after two days.

In the aftermath of the ferry carnage, the decision to put such a violence- prone person back on the streets outraged observers, officials and doctors alike. New York City Mayor Ed Koch ordered his mental-health commissioner to investigate the procedures that were followed from the time Gonzalez was taken to Presbyterian to the time he was arrested.

To no one's surprise, the investigation determined that Gonzalez's release had been "premature," and the hospital's city contracts were put under review. In fact, doctors had considered further hospitalization but could find no space for Gonzalez at the facility. In any case, the hospital said, he had responded well to treatment and had been issued antipsychotic drugs to take with him upon release. Moreover, Gonzalez had agreed to report as an outpatient to another hospital. He never did. The next time he attracted official notice was on the ferry.

That left the public grappling with a question that has been coming up again and again: Why are dangerously deranged people allowed to roam at large? Koch himself expressed the common perplexity. "If someone is irrational, particularly with thoughts of killing expressed," said the mayor, "one would say, as a lay person, that the fact he says the next day 'I'm feeling O.K. now' doesn't necessarily mean he's O.K."