One Man’s Year on Rikers Exposes Limits of Mental Health Reforms

Alex Lothor was a step away from finishing it all.

He was standing on a shelf above a sixth floor apartment in Dyker Heights, as NYPD officers and the US Marshall fugitives task force yelled at him to get off on March 14, 2024.

“I’m standing there with weeds and light pipes,” recalled the 37-year-old Lotor in a prison interview on Rikers Island almost a year later.

That moment was a low point in his long-standing struggle with bipolar I disorder, leading him to escape from Pennsylvania law, his wife and two children, and to be in Brooklyn.

A few months ago, he fled to his brother’s apartment and avoided an arrest warrant issued after he committed a “terrorist threat” to officers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where officers previously arrested him for fleeing the officers nearly 30 minutes after a traffic stop, court records show.

In Brooklyn, NYPD officials persuaded him to leave the shelf and asked him to point to his psychotropic drugs, according to Rotar.

The pills were in white bags inside the apartment, he said.

“I thought they were caring at first,” Lotor told the city. “They let me take another hit of marijuana before arresting me.”

However, the bag is equipped with luggage. Criminal complaint From the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Loter says he planned to use a gun to take his life.

Since last March, Rotar has been locked up at Rikers Island, trying to convince prosecutors to handle his case that he will do better service in some kind of mental health program.

He is one of the estimated 3,000 people diagnosed with some kind of serious mental illness as his lawsuit progresses slowly.

Of these, 21% have been diagnosed with severe depression or bipolar disorder, the Ministry of Corrected Records shows. In contrast, only 6% of the country’s general population has received such a diagnosis, according to domestic government health records.

As he waits locked in, Lotor says he was attacked by another Riker detainee with a serious mental illness. The man appeared behind him and thrust his face onto the floor. It alleges a lawsuit filed by Rothal following the incident against the city’s Department of Corrections.

“Our deals are complicated.”

Rotar’s ongoing criminal cases touch on several aspects, including mental illness, the court system struggling to deal with complex cases, and violence against Riker.

They argue that cases like Rotar emphasize the need to overhaul how the criminal justice system deals with mental illness, and that some European models promise better terms.

In Scandinavia and Germany, people with mental health and drug problems are automatically diverted from the criminal system to a completely separate mental health track where psychiatric care for inpatients and outpatients is given.

“It shows the need for more supportive and potentially safe housing or placement options, even when they are waiting or waiting for a temperament.

In Pennsylvania, Lotor faces allegedly a parole violation charges and is also hoped that he allegedly threatened to kill the arrest officer and the officer’s family, according to court records.

The out-of-state case appears to have torpedoed his chance to transfer his case to a mental health court in Brooklyn. There, the defendant is more likely to be sentenced to some sort of rehabilitation program rather than a prison.

“The courts have limited resources and we don’t intend to waste them on anyone returning to prison after or during the program,” said a law enforcement officer familiar with his Brooklyn case who asked him to remain anonymous for an ongoing trial.

A spokesman for Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez declined to comment, citing a pending criminal case.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn Judge Matthew Damick has been the borough’s mental health court for 23 years, and said he and his team are proud to take on challenging cases.

Alex Lotor says he was brought to Rikers Island on March 20, 2025, despite committing suicide at the time of his arrest. credit: Ben Fukuchumberg

“Our dealings are complicated, right?” he told the city, noting that he could not comment specifically on the pending incident of Lothar. “So all these cases are complicated. They have different diagnoses, criminal charges, degrees of criminal history, and history of mental history.”

Defence counsel and program participants view mental health courts as a potentially life-saving off-ramp for those who have been caught up in the criminal justice system and are caught up in the Riker.

D’Emic said mental health court judges even coordinate with prosecutors outside of New York City from time to time.

“Sometimes they say, ‘Go ahead! We’re not going to spend any money to get them back here,” he said. “Or we can work with out-of-state courts to provide you with an update on how treatment progresses.”

Rotar’s ordeal aside, records show that the mentally ill defendant charged in Brooklyn has the best chance of having people in other districts transfer their case to a specialized mental health court.

Brooklyn’s Felony Mental Health Court oversaw approximately 250 cases in 2022, and Manhattan handled it around the age of 75. Staten Island processed 44, court records show. Queens was 41.

“We’ve hired more case managers to help us track caseloads that have grown so much over the past few years,” D’Emic told the city. “It’s labor-intensive and there’s no doubt about that. But honestly, the Court Administration Office has money behind it, at least as far as Brooklyn is concerned.”

One fixed point remains. Nowadays, prosecutors usually decide whether or not the case should be moved to a mental health court.

Advocates want to give defense attorneys and judges more power. Lots of support Non-Prison Treatmenta law proposed in Albany that eliminates the role of a prosecutor as a gatekeeper.

Supported by all the state’s major public defense organizations, the law also calls for the expansion of those eligible to move their cases to specialist courts.

So far, the measure has stagnated in Albany. That’s what the state bill version was First introduced In 2020, State Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens), currently running for mayor.

Meanwhile, Rotar is currently working behind the bar checking out people who are committing suicide. Every day he walks up and down the cell block to make sure people in the residential unit are breathing inside Otis C. Bantum Facilities To Riker.

He earns $81 a week on shifts from 6am to 2pm as a suicide prevention aide.

As for his criminal case, he is in the process of changing his attorneys after first hiring a personal attorney from Pennsylvania. He hopes his new lawyer will have more success moving his case to mental health court.

“I want to be mandated by a hospital in the area where I take my medication every morning,” he told the city.

Overeating and fantasy

His legal odyssey is the latest confusion in life filled with ups and downs.

Rotha was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and moved to the United States with his parents when he was 12 years old.

“We were abused as Jews,” he recalled. “My mother had to change my last name because if you have a Jewish surname, you could be abused more.”

His mother gave him the name of Lothal after her first husband, who was not Jewish.

Like many Ukrainian immigrants, the family moved to an apartment near Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, with the help of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Association (HIAS), the city’s largest immigration aid agency.

“We had a lot of families here,” Loter said.

However, he struggled at James Madison High School and dropped out at the age of 16.

“I started to have mental and drug issues,” he said. “I used cocaine and marijuana.”

Alex Rotar holds a shirt he says shows blood stains from the attack on Rikers Island on March 20, 2025. credit: Ben Fukchumberg/City

He got a comparable diploma and then briefly attended what was now closed. Bramson Ort Institute of Technologya non-profit university.

“I failed at that,” he said. “I was confused for a while.”

Desperate to get his life back on track, he went to an inpatient drug rehabilitation program Dynamite Youth Center Two years.

“It really helped me. It basically changed my life,” he said.

A friend of the program later helped him do a job “making great money” as a sales representative in the Diamond District of Manhattan.

At the age of 21, he fell in love and married a fellow Ukrainian immigrant who moved to New York as a child.

“We came from everything,” he said.

He switched jobs and worked for 10 years in T-Mobile sales and business management.

Around 2017, the couple moved to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where they lived what appeared to be an idyllic life with their parents living next door. They had two children and he opened three coffee shops.

“It was Turkish coffee. Something different for the region,” he said.

Covid then hit.

Customers have been locked down and business has been slowed down. At the same time, he decided to take office as a state legislator and, ultimately, for the sake of Congress.

The veteran local politician was attacked and he claims he “wanted me.”

Meanwhile, he also claims to have randomly seen a group of police officers beating young black women and recorded the incident on his phone.

“I stopped them and told them it was wrong,” he said. “After that, everything went to sh-t.”

He says police have since harassed him, and he has begun to “episode” multiple mental health. At one point, he rushed his Mercedes from the police during a traffic stop. He was also arrested for a gun, court records show.

He went to Pennsylvania for 14 months in prison.

“I stopped taking medication,” he recalls, noting that a doctor had prescribed Lexapro, Abilify and short-term lithium a few years ago.

“If I was taking medication, I would be like this completely normal person.

Before he was locked up, he said he would go to “Binge Runs.” He also spent a lot of money and at some point he bought the car to a random person, he added.

“It turns me into someone who doesn’t want to be,” he said.

It happened again in Pennsylvania when he took off his medicine. He raised a parole officer and fled to his brother’s apartment in Brooklyn. He also said he thought the officers who arrested him were trying to kill him.

“I was paranoid,” he recalled.

Brian of the Judicial Innovation Center said that while Lotor clearly needs help, prisons are not the answer.

“What’s really tragedy is this false choice we put ourselves in and you have to send someone to a death trap like Riker or nothing,” she said. “What if he was identified as someone with mental health needs and could put together a treatment plan while the DA was considering what to do with the case?”

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