
Advertisement
Advertisement
About six of his new neighbors told him the same thing: There was a mentally ill man in the neighborhood who destroyed trees, and the crab apple might prove a tempting target. Kunitzky was worried, but his plant was left unharmed—at least for the time being.
Advertisement
Advertisement
As M.H.A. told me, he felt for Maynard, just as he felt for the teenage drug dealers he saw operating on his block. But ultimately he was angry and resented him. “When you don’t have a job and money is scarce,” he said. “Everything becomes personalized.”

Advertisement
Advertisement
“People urinating in public and not cleaning up after their dog,” she said, “those are things we deal with every day. But you can’t blame every dog owner and you can’t blame every drunk on the corner. When you have someone taking down trees singlehandedly, though, everyone’s anger can be focused on that person. It made it very easy. It made it direct.”Some residents became vengeful, collecting Maynard’s broken tree limbs and dumping them in his mother’s courtyard. A few left her nasty notes. They blamed her, perhaps out of desperation.By March, Michael Kunitzky had become a leader in the neighborhood by founding LaunchPad, a non-profit community art space. He also discovered that his crab apple tree had been brutalized. A few months later, an angry Desiree Maynard contacted Kunitzky. She'd heard he was responsible for the broken branches in her courtyard. Kunitzky assured her that he wasn't, and expressed his sympathies. Maynard opened up to him. She told him that the local police had detained her son and brought him to the emergency room on numerous occasions. She said she had begged the doctors to hold her son, but that each time he was released because he had not met the criteria for involuntarily hospitalization.
Advertisement

Advertisement
Advertisement

-----
Earlier this year Steve Maynard was declared fit to stand trial. On June 7, 2011, he appeared before a judge at Brooklyn Mental Health Court. His eyes wide and sad, Maynard pled guilty to two counts of criminal mischief, one of which was felonious and carried a prison sentence. The court offered the option to enter a mental health treatment program in lieu of prison time, and Maynard took it.He is now free to live in society, but only on the condition that he take his medication, stay away from drugs and alcohol, and meet regularly with a counselor. The treatment program is scheduled to last as long as 16 months. If he passes it, the felony will be dismissed and he’ll be sentenced on the remaining misdemeanor and given a conditional discharge, which requires that he stay out of trouble for one year. If he fails, if he relapses and falls back into trouble, the prison sentence will be applied and he’ll go to jail for up to six years.Two weeks before the hearing, a community meeting was held at LaunchPad and Maynard’s possible return to the neighborhood gave way to a heated discussion. Some voiced frustration and disbelief. What if it starts all over again? Others said that it was different now. The courts were involved, and Maynard’s mother was willing to take him back. “We can’t ban people from the community just because we don’t like them,” one woman said. Mike Fagan, who led the discussion, nodded his head.“We’ll always have a population that can’t be stabilized and live in the community,” Fagan told me. “It’s very small, but it’s there. And we need to find a way to deal with it humanely.”