Mayor Zohran Mamdani ordered an investigation into how Bellevue Hospital handles psychiatric evaluations after a retired Upper West Side special education teacher was pushed down a subway staircase by a man released from the hospital only hours earlier. Ross Falzone, 76, of West 85th Street, was found unconscious and unresponsive at the No. 1 subway station in Chelsea at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday and died after being rushed to Bellevue Hospital.
Police arrested Rhamell Burke, 32, shortly after the attack. Investigators said Burke had already been picked up once that day by police outside the 17th Precinct stationhouse on the East Side because he was acting erratically. When officers approached him, police said he brandished a stick, but an officer defused the situation and Burke was transported to Bellevue for a psychiatric evaluation before being released shortly afterward. Police said he then apparently shoved Falzone to his death in an unprovoked attack five hours later, and Falzone was pronounced dead at 3 a.m. Friday with a traumatic brain injury, a fractured spine and a broken rib.
The killing has already turned into a test of the city’s psychiatric safety net. Mamdani said New Yorkers deserve answers and directed NYC Health + Hospitals to conduct an immediate investigation into what should have been done to prevent the tragedy, along with a broader review of psychiatric evaluation and discharge protocols across the public hospital system. That review will reach beyond Bellevue itself, putting the hospital’s decisions under scrutiny as the city weighs how a man who had just been evaluated could be released and, within hours, end up accused in a homicide.
Falzone’s family said the loss was immediate and devastating. His sister, Donna Falzone, said her brother was a retired special education teacher who held a doctoral degree from Columbia University. She said the family learned of the attack at 4 in the morning and described their reaction as shock and anger. For now, the central question is not whether Burke was identified — police say he was arrested — but whether the system that saw him first in the day failed the city and a man simply trying to get home.
