Nikita Stewart, Katie Van Syckle and Ashley Southall

It took 28 stitches to sew him up after he was slashed with a box cutter several weeks ago, he explained late Saturday, slurring his words. “I drink a lot,” he said.

Hours earlier, not far from where Vanbrackle, who is 62 and homeless, sat on a bench, four homeless men were bludgeoned to death as they slept on the street in Chinatown at the base of the Bowery.

A 24-year-old homeless man, Randy Santos, was charged Sunday with four counts of murder. Santos’ criminal history suggests he had been caught in a downward spiral for months before the attacks, accused of biting a worker at an employment agency in the garment district in Manhattan last October and punching a stranger in the eye on a Q subway train four days later, the police said.

The deaths of the four men brought the dangers of living on the street into full public view, renewing attention on the unsheltered homeless, who make up only about 5% of the estimated 79,000 homeless people in New York City.

And the Bowery, an area of Lower Manhattan known in the 1930s as New York’s skid row, has long served as a daunting example of the city’s difficulties in addressing street homelessness. If anything, the problem is getting worse: The area is now drawing younger homeless people, many with drug and mental health problems, a population that the city’s traditional outreach methods have struggled to confront.

The homelessness crisis has been the most intractable problem of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure. His $1 billion initiative to address mental health, ThriveNYC, has been criticized for failing to meet the needs of severely mentally ill people. The administration has also been slow to open new shelters as planned, leaving an estimated 3,600 people — many of them men who are emotionally disturbed and struggling with addiction — on the street.

Santos is accused of wielding a metal bar and swinging it at the men’s heads as they were asleep on the ground on a night that saw temperatures dip to 49 degrees. One of the men who was killed, Cheun Kok, was 83 years old, police said. A fifth victim, a 49-year-old man, remained in critical condition Sunday, officials said.

When spotted by a police officer at 2 a.m. Saturday, Santos was carrying a metal bar covered in fresh blood and hair, according to a criminal complaint.

In May, Santos was arrested and kicked out of a men’s shelter in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, after he was accused of pummeling a 24-year-old resident in the face, police said. It was his third attack in less than seven months; the case was dismissed in August.

Santos had worked in construction but lost his job when he began using drugs, according to Nelson Reyes, a neighbor of Santos’ mother in the Bronx. “He started smoking crack,” Reyes, 39, said. “Then he started losing his mind.”

Reyes said he believed the killings were a twisted and desperate cry for attention. “My reaction was, ‘Randy? You serious?’ ” Reyes said. “He wasn’t a bad kid at all. He’d play dumb but I think he just needed attention.”

Santos’ lawyer, Arnold Levine, had no comment.

Police said investigators were reviewing six seconds of surveillance video that showed a man in a dark jacket and pants swinging a metal bar at least four times and striking a motionless target under a blanket on the sidewalk. The footage, with a time stamp of 12:36 a.m. Saturday, was posted on YouTube later that day by The World Journal, a national Chinese-language newspaper based in New York.

As news of the attacks spread near the Bowery, homeless men living on the street expressed fear for their safety. But Vanbrackle said he had learned to prepare for the worst. He pointed to a metal pipe in a shopping cart filled with scrap metal, aluminum cans and an air-conditioner. “I don’t worry,” he said. “I have an iron pipe.”

Community District 3, a cluster of neighborhoods bordered on the west by the Bowery, has one of the highest concentrations of homeless shelters — at least two dozen — in Manhattan, and many of them house single men.

Men have historically found refuge in cheap motels and flophouses along the Bowery, which has long welcomed the downtrodden with nowhere else to turn. Benedict Giamo, a professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, described the lodgings as “nasty places.”

“But they still got out of the cold — they could have a cot, a roof, maybe a locker,” said Giamo, who did field work in the area in the late 1970s and published “On the Bowery: Confronting Homelessness in American Society” in 1989.

“The Bowery men were considered commercial assets and not liabilities,” he said. “They would go to the bar and spend a little money. Go to pawnshops, liquor stores.”

The neighborhood grew and changed, drawing upscale markets and buildings with doormen.

But homelessness has persisted, and longtime residents have raised concerns about a new subpopulation within the homeless community.

A recent report described them as “travelers” or “young homeless people who travel to destinations depending on the weather, and often include instances of drug use and aggression.”

Over the past three years, complaints have increased about these younger arrivals, and the police and homeless outreach workers have said that “traditional outreach is not successful with this population,” according to the report.

Community leaders said Saturday that the neighborhoods needed better mental health services and additional supportive housing and safe-haven beds.

So-called safe havens — specialized shelters that have fewer restrictions and a less bureaucratic application process to quickly place people into permanent housing — have been credited with a modest decline in the city’s street homelessness population. People on the street prefer them because many of the men’s shelters have a reputation for petty thefts and fights. Safe havens are smaller and even offer private rooms.

Supportive housing provides apartments where formerly homeless residents pay a modest rent and also receive services for mental health and substance abuse.

Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3, described the area’s homeless outreach workers as “dedicated, caring and patient people.”

“They keep trying to forge relationships over days, months, years,” she added. “But what they can do is limited, especially without more safe-haven and stabilization beds and other supportive housing.”

Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, a Democrat who represents neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan, said the brutal murders should serve as an alert to city officials to find new ways to curb homelessness and treat mental illness. “Unfortunately, it’s evident that we’ve failed as a city at building deeply affordable housing,” Rivera said. “How we provide mental health services — we have to do better. We cannot treat this as business as usual, and we need a comprehensive plan.”

She questioned the effectiveness of ThriveNYC, led by Chirlane McCray, de Blasio’s wife. Critics argue that the mental health initiative does not meet the needs of people who are most in peril.

“We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Thrive,” Rivera said. “What are the metrics? What is the rubric we are using? A lot of this comes back to building deeply affordable housing.”

Advocates for homeless people have pushed de Blasio, a Democrat, to adjust his plan to build and preserve 300,000 affordable housing units by including more units to move people out of shelters and off the street.

De Blasio has resisted. Instead, his administration has focused on opening safer shelters with more services, hoping to decrease the homeless population by about 500 people per year.

So far, the strategy is not working. New York City is scheduled to open 90 shelters by 2022, and should have opened 40 by now. But it has opened only 26, stalled by residents who have banded together to pressure elected officials and even to sue the city. The most vocal objections have been to shelters for single men, whether they are in Maspeth, Queens, or Crown Heights, Brooklyn, or on the so-called Billionaire’s Row in Manhattan. Last week, residents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan protested the city’s decision to turn a women’s shelter into one for men.

Steven Banks, the commissioner of the Department of Social Services, has no direct control over the mayor’s housing plan, but he has tried to manage the homelessness crisis with the shelters, facing angry elected officials and residents at forums. He said the murders were “a heartbreaking reminder of why we do the work we do every day, to help people going through hard times, including those who may be troubled, get the support they need.”

But the city is hard pressed to find communities that embrace men’s shelters.

“We see them, but we don’t want to see them,” said Hakki Akdeniz, an advocate for homeless people.

Akdeniz, 39, is the owner of Champion Pizza, a chain of restaurants in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. He sobbed Saturday, mourning the four deaths. “We think of homeless people like they are not human,” he said through his tears.

He was once one of them. Days after he arrived in New York City in 2001, Akdeniz said, he ran out of the money he had: $240. But he found help, moving into Bowery Mission, one of the city’s oldest aid organizations.

Akdeniz, a Turkish immigrant, volunteers there now, pleading with homeless men to consider moving off the street and into shelters. “At least it’s safe,” he said. “There’s more safety than on the outside.”

Wilfredo Molina, who said he was in his 60s, said he had been living on the streets since after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he received a diagnosis of mental illness. He did not want to be a burden on his family, he said, so he turned to street living.

“I sleep with one eye open and one eye closed,” he said.

Crouched on a curb across from Bowery Mission, Miquel Rosa, 59, said few people understood how frequently homeless people were assaulted on the streets. “A homeless person is getting beat up here every day,” he said.

Rosa now lives in a safe haven that allows him to check out for three days, so he spends some nights outside where he can be with friends.

On Saturday, he said, he had seen a police van idling nearby during the day. “I guess they want people to feel a little more safe tonight,” Rosa said.

This article originally appeared in

How a Murderous Rampage Reveals Perils for the City's Street Homeless

NEW YORK — A police van idled and a single piece of yellow caution tape flapped from a nearby tree as Benjamin Vanbrackle pulled his shirt down to show the fresh scar that wrapped around his neck to the top of his chest.

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Nikita Stewart, Katie Van Syckle and Ashley Southall

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How a Murderous Rampage Reveals Perils for the City's Street Homeless