Seven people have been found outside in the extreme cold and pronounced dead since Saturday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a weather briefing Monday morning.
Nationwide, officials have confirmed at least 21 deaths related to the winter storm that dumped more than a foot of snow into 19 states including New York, while nine additional deaths are still being investigated.
The Office of Chief Medical Examiner told THE CITY it is still investigating the deaths in New York City and that “no final determinations have been made yet” regarding their causes.
“What we know is that a number of those seven New Yorkers who lost their lives had interactions with our shelter system in the past,” Mamdani said at his Monday morning briefing. “We haven’t seen this kind of cold for eight years, and it is debilitating.”
Four unsheltered people died of “exposure to excessive natural cold” over that winter, which included a blizzard and a record stretch of frigid days between December 2017 and January 2018, according to a city report.
Of the deaths this weekend, meanwhile, four people were pronounced dead on the scene — two in Brooklyn, one in Manhattan, and another in North Corona in Queens — while two others were transported to hospitals where they were declared dead, Gothamist reported on Sunday. Officials have not shared details about the seventh person.
Overall, Mamdani said, homeless outreach workers placed more than 170 unsheltered individuals into Department of Homeless Services sites over the weekend. More than 4,500 New Yorkers currently live on the streets, according to the city’s latest estimate.
An additional three people were involuntarily transported to hospitals for mental health evaluations, according to Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park.
Wasow Park declined to provide details to “protect people’s medical privacy”, but said clinicians may pursue the measure if someone “is unable to acknowledge that there are real dangers … particularly in this weather.”
“That is our solution of last resort,” Wasow Park said.
Mamdani added: “It is a resort when it is of medical danger to a New Yorker to stay out there.”
Outreach teams will continue to ramp up their efforts on Monday to connect unhoused New Yorkers to shelters during the “Code Blue” event — the city’s designation for its special protocol on below-freezing nights — Mamdani said, as temperatures are expected to remain well below 32 degrees all week.
“Just because the storm has passed does not mean that the danger to homeless New Yorkers has passed,” he said. “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort.”
Speaking from a train platform in Brooklyn Monday morning, a 51-year-old unsheltered man who asked not to be named said he’d spent Saturday night on the train and Sunday night at a Lower Manhattan Dunkin’ Donuts to keep warm.
The man, an asylum seeker from the Bahamas, said he came to the United States nearly three years ago and has been in New York City for about the last two. He’s shuffled in and out of shelters, he added, but often ends up back in the intake center in Manhattan, hoping to be reassigned to a different shelter after being harassed by other residents.
“They tried to get me to go to the shelter where the people discriminated me, and I feel very insulted,” he said, describing his intake processes. “Everywhere I go it’s the same thing.”
He had come to New York two years ago after living unsheltered in Florida because a man who had been helping him with his asylum application had encouraged him to do so.
“I thought in New York I could probably get what I need right away and I could get what I need and leave before the [cold] weather reach,” he said. “So I came to New York and got stuck.”
“I didn’t want to stay here in no cold.”
