A man who tried to cover two women in poop on New York’s Upper East Side has been caught. That being said, I’m still out of this city.
The New York Daily News reports that after the suspect, named as Ekwan Hill, 42, tried to shove poop down a woman’s pants, he hurled feces in another woman’s face. NBC New York claims he “smeared” feces on the second victim, which is slightly different, although given the choice, you would probably not opt for either one to befall you.
As you might expect, the suspected assailant is not well: police received a tip that led them to Hill, who has reportedly been living in a Brooklyn homeless shelter for the last 10 months. The NYPD’s chief of detectives told the NYDN that the man is a “completely deranged person, from what we can tell.”
A shelter resident named Worthy told the Daily News—in their second report today on this matter—that Hill is “really borderline delirious—bad body odor, talks to himself, keeps to himself.”
Worthy added: “Those feces he threw was probably his own. He’s an outcast type of dude.”
It’s worth noting that both the Post and the Daily News ran cover stories today about people having terrible mental health-related episodes in public: the News went with the poop, while the Post focused on the guy who had a distressing nude meltdown in Times Square.
(The Times Square man has been identified as Krit McClean, a young student and model. He was transported to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric assessment after jumping off a fairly low ledge in Times Square. The police managed not to shoot him, to everyone’s relief.)
The poop assailant, then, is both a depressing story about the kinds of things that can happen when you live in a country lacking a strong mental healthcare framework, and also a sign that I need to move before the copycat attacks start.