Since March 3, a serial killer has been raging in the streets of New York. He had shot two homeless people and wounded three others in the space of a week. Gerald Brevard III was finally arrested on March 15 and charged with first degree murder.
In an article published in the New York Times this Monday, we learn more about the profile of the 3 men. If they suffered from mental and addictive disorders and had chained stays in psychiatric hospitals and in prison, they each started life with a different story.
Morgan Holmes, who was killed on March 9 by multiple gunshots and knives as he slept in his tent, was not promised such a bleak future.
He grew up in Philadelphia in the 1980s. A star basketball player and renowned musician, he has many fans. To pay for his university studies, he enlisted in the army, in Georgia. He met his wife there and had a daughter, Kisa.
On his return to Philadelphia, only in his twenties, Morgan Holmes begins to act strangely.
“Things have changed, I couldn’t tell you how,” his wife told The New York Times. It will be years before she learns that he has a serious mental illness: schizophrenia.
So, as the disease advances, Morgan Holmes becomes unmanageable. It remains silent for months, then reappears before disappearing again. He alternates between homes and psychiatric establishments.
According to his daughter Kisa, he kept running away because “He didn’t want his children and his family to see him in a degrading position”.
Abdoulaye Coulibaly, the second victim of Gerald Brevard III, lived in China Town, a district of New York where the streets are teeming with tourists and traveling markets. He sold paperbacks there until he too fell ill.
This native of Gambia was 50 years old. He had arrived in the United States in his twenties. A few years ago, “He lost his mind,” said Moumouni Karamdirr, a resident of the shelter who knew Abdoulaye Coulibaly.
The man then stops working, but he does not leave China Town. “He died at home. He didn’t know anything else about this country,” Moumouni Karamdirr said. He was shot several times in Manhattan while he slept in a doorway.
As for the serial killer, Gerald Brevard III, the New York Times reports that he quickly plunged into drugs at the time of adolescence.
“We lived in southeast DC, a high-crime part of town, and he was starting to get in trouble,” says his father, who is moving with him to a suburban town in Maryland. But her son’s mental health is deteriorating. He multiplies the crimes: destruction of property, armed robbery, sexual assault, credit card theft… In 2019, he is sent to a psychiatric center where his victim, Morgan Holmes, had also been admitted some time before.
Gerald Brevard III was released from his final prison term last July, just before he turned 30.
According to the New York Times, the series of murders come as New York City faces a serious crisis linked to the increase in homelessness and untreated mental disorders that have multiplied during the pandemic.
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