The deranged man charged with stabbing 6-year-old Prince Joshua Avitto to death, and with grievously slashing 7-year-old Mikayla Capers, should never have been free to roam New York City’s streets.
Daniel St. Hubert is also suspected of two additional stabbings, one fatal, since he was released from state prison two weeks ago. Corrections and parole officials must be called to account for setting him loose without psychiatric treatment.
New York has a statute that is designed to protect the public from dangerous mentally ill people, while also safeguarding the sick. Called Kendra’s Law, it authorizes the courts to order forced medication or hospitalization for troubled individuals who are a danger to themselves or others.
Based on his history of schizophrenia and violence, St. Hubert was a prime candidate to get help under Kendra’s Law. Still worse, St. Hubert’s sister says she pleaded in vain with officials to provide him medication after his release.
She told The News he was diagnosed in prison with paranoid schizophrenia, after trying to strangle their mother with a telephone cord in 2009.
Before he even went on trial for that, St. Hubert was institutionalized three times as unfit. While incarcerated, he refused psychiatric treatment and anger-management therapy, even after he was convicted of assaulting a corrections officer.
When St. Hubert reached his maximum sentence, the state corrections department let him go. It did so despite a 2013 law that expanded the reach of Kendra’s Law, named after Kendra Webdale, who was fatally thrown on subway tracks by a madman who had eluded institutionalization.
The measure directed prison officials to evaluate mentally ill inmates before they’re discharged — and, if necessary, recommend that inmates be ordered into psychiatric treatment once they’re released. Applying the law is critical because, as Mayor de Blasio said, “there’s a fundamental problem in this city, in this state, in this country, that the prison system has been used as a de facto mental health system for too many individuals.”
The statute, based on a measure sponsored by upstate Sen. Cathy Young, was written to cover prisoners who receive mental health treatment behind bars. St. Hubert refused such help — and so, absurdly, he may have been given a pass.
Even so, St. Hubert’s parole officer or social worker still had the power to ask a court to invoke Kendra’s Law, for his good and that of the public.
Gov. Cuomo must order a full review of how St. Hubert was free to kill, and he must join Young in closing any and all Kendra’s Law loopholes.
