New York City: Murder in the Cathedral

The madman’s repeated clashes with authority fit a maddeningly familiar pattern: since arriving in the U.S. from Cuba as part of the Mariel boatlift in 1980, Jorge Delgado had been arrested at least eleven times for petty crimes and hospitalized as a mental patient seven times. Once he had smashed a chalice during a service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Twice in the past six months, city psychiatrists had examined him and failed to discover any reason not to return him to the streets.

They obviously overlooked something. Outside St. Patrick’s last Wednesday night, the 6-ft. 5-in. Delgado stripped off his clothes, entered the soaring Manhattan landmark and began to strike worshipers. Police officer James McMann, 50, radioed for help before Delgado knocked him out with a wrought- iron prayer stand and then struck and killed usher John Winters, 77. Lunging at one of three newly arrived policemen, he was shot dead. Afterward, John Cardinal O’Connor recalled that he had touched and blessed Delgado when he noticed the man looked disturbed at Mass that morning. In a city where tens of thousands of mentally disturbed people wander freely, could anyone do more?