Mamdani and Hochul yuck it up after one other assault by a mentally sick NYC felony

Random attacks on New York transit have soared since 2020, and the reason is often violent psychosis that severs a person’s link to reality. Such symptoms were on display after Sunday night’s mass knifing at Penn Station, which injured five people. To wit: the morning after the attack, Gov. Hochul and Mayor Mamdani were delusionally raving.

Sunday’s alleged Penn Station attacker, Hector Deleon, 51, has a history of violence. In 2022, he pled guilty in New Jersey to stabbing a victim in the neck, after that person ordered him off private property following previous thefts.

Stabbing someone in the neck — the victim needed nine stitches — isn’t exactly a non-violent crime. But a judge gave him probation, and ordered him to continue mental-health treatment and perform community service.

That didn’t take. He faced rearrest last month for stealing from a Jersey Dunkin’ tip jar, but went free again despite his history.

Deleon is crazy but maybe not that crazy: possibly upset about his looming court appearance next week on that charge, he somehow made his way to New York, armed, to harm as many people as he could in a high-profile location.

He chose our interstate transit hub — the nexus of the Knicks playoffs and of travel to the Jersey World Cup matches, all happening this week.

This guy looks like a Frank James. James, remember, was the low-level criminal who traveled to New York from out of state four years ago to carry out a terrorist mass shooting on a Brooklyn train, injuring ten.

No, New York can’t stop every out-of-towner let loose by an equally lenient state and attracted to the big city as a tempting target.

But they could show a little concern beyond statements of wishing and praying?

Especially since the Penn Station carnage is the city’s second mass-casualty stabbing attack at a Manhattan transit hub in two months.

And also since Mamdani still owes us the explanation for the fatal pushing, last month, of 76-year-old Ross Falzone down some Manhattan subway stairs. In that case, the city-run Bellevue psych ward released the suspect hours before he allegedly murdered.

Two hours after Sunday’s Penn Station attack, Hochul and Mamdani jointly called a press conference in core Manhattan, for Monday morning at 10 am.

The topic, though, was all — literally — fun and games.

In the open air of Central Park, Hochul, jauntily wearing a white-visor cap as if she were a luxury cruise ship customer taking a stroll on the deck, had nothing but smiles. “Can you guys feel it in the air, everybody? There’s something different!” she enthused.

When the guests and press corps didn’t clap and cheer on command, she tried again: “everybody’s so alive!”

Yes, alive is a good thing to be on the day after the city’s latest stranger-on-strangers transit attack.

But Hochul rambled for five minutes without saying a word about the attack of just 15 hours previously.

Instead, she wanted to talk about a free World Cup watch party.

Mamdani, following Hochul, spent his five minutes reminiscing about “when I was a child growing up in East Africa” playing soccer, before gliding into the “language of delivering joy” for “a summer that will be memorable.”

Again, maybe a word to reassure New Yorkers as well as Knicks and World Cup visitors that something like this can’t happen again, this week or ever?

Because it keeps happening. Though Sunday’s attack was on Amtrak and not state-transit property, New York’s violent transit felonies are 3.2% higher, through April, compared to last year.

It’s a bad sign that we’re reversing Adams-era progress here, since such transit violence remains 29% higher than in 2019.

Under Mamdani, citywide, calls to report to quality-of-life distress on the transit system are up 36%. This unchecked disorder underground means more random violence — exactly what we’re seeing.

Penn Station and surrounding blocks are so teeming with disturbed individuals — despite a federal, state and local police presence — that it’s hard for cops to pick out any one person before he snaps.

So what are Hochul and Mamdani doing?

“Wake up everyone, we have soccer on the brain,” Hochul said Monday.

Proof that the mental unwellness epidemic rages.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.