A man met with instantaneous death after he jumped from the 16th floor of a luxury high-rise Manhattan apartment block. The yet-to-be-identified 64-year-old male leaped from the Tribeca Park building on Chambers Street at around 11 pm on March 20. His body’s remains were splattered across the building’s courtyard.
Once news spread about the jumper, some neighbors speculated that the apparent suicide could have been related to the state’s regulations regarding self-isolation measures to contain the coronavirus. While most people are keeping busy and taking up projects at home, and many celebrities tweeting, live streaming and posting videos from their homes, those with underlying mental health issues can respond erratically to such imposed isolation.
One resident heard the news when she came down for a smoke break. “They told me someone jumped,”she said, adding, “you have to be mentally strong to take on isolation. The uncertainty of what’s going to happen is scary.” However, the police have not linked the death to the coronavirus pandemic or the lockdown in New York.
The lockdown has affected the state’s more than 19 million residents. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the sweeping orders on March 20, severely restricting gatherings of any size. All workers in nonessential businesses have been ordered to stay home. Under the coronavirus lockdown rules, nonessential gatherings of people of any size or for any reason are canceled or postponed, including parties and celebrations.
Most people isolated in their own homes might feel like they are in prison but in New York’s actual prisons, being in solitary is possibly the best bet to staying alive. New York City was hit by the nation’s largest coronavirus jail outbreak to date this week, with at least 38 people testing positive at the notorious Rikers Island complex and nearby facilities — more than half of them are incarcerated men, the board that oversees the city’s jail system said on March 21.
More than 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States — more than anywhere in the world — and there are growing fears that an outbreak could spread rapidly through a vast network of federal and state prisons, county jails and detention centers.
It’s a tightly packed, fluid population that is already grappling with high rates of health problems and, when it comes to the elderly and the intern, there are elevated risks of serious complications.
With limited capacity nationally to test for COVID-19, men and women inside worry that they are last in line when showing flu-like symptoms, meaning that some may be infected without knowing it.
The first positive tests from inside prisons and jails started trickling out just over a week ago, with less than two dozen officers and staff infected in other facilities from California and Michigan to Pennsylvania.
In a letter to New York’s criminal justice leaders, Board of Correction interim chairwoman Jacqueline Sherman described a jail system in crisis. She said in the last week, board members learned that 12 Department of Correction employees, five Correctional Health Services employees, and 21 people in custody at Rikers and city jails had tested positive for the coronavirus. And at least another 58 were being monitored in the prison’s contagious disease and quarantine units, she said.
“It is likely these people have been in hundreds of housing areas and common areas over recent weeks and have been in close contact with many other people in custody and staff,” said Sherman, warning that cases could skyrocket. “The best path forward to protecting the community of people housed and working in the jails is to rapidly decrease the number of people housed and working in them.”
(With AP inputs)
