When a promising entrepreneur was seized by mental illness, his neighbors became victims and he became trapped in a broken system.
Dhiraj Arora had terrorized Fort Greene for years, but the campaign he launched on a warm January night in Brooklyn was remarkable even for him. Just after 2 a.m., he threw bottles at Evelina, a trattoria on DeKalb Avenue, smashing a large window. From there, he took aim at Izzy Rose in neighboring Clinton Hill, where a security camera captured him pitching shards of concrete through the cocktail bar’s large storefront window.
But Arora’s bluster masked his struggle with bipolar and alcohol-use disorders, a dual diagnosis that made it impossible for him to maintain his business. Over the past decade, his family and friends watched helplessly as his mental health declined, taking away the success he’d earned and sending him down a destructive path.
Indeed, police haven’t made a difference when it comes to treating Arora’s own crisis or, until recently, preventing him from terrorizing people. Mental-health court gives defendants a chance to enter treatment programs as an alternative to jail or prison, but none of Arora’s cases appear to have gone through the court.
Whatever high Arora might have felt crashed when, a few months later, one of the police officers who arrested him filed a $57 million lawsuit against Arora claiming he had assaulted her. The case was dismissed, but the negative publicity from the incident, along with Arora’s deteriorating mental health, virtually doomed his business and he filed for bankruptcy in 2014.
When he is not at home or in a hospital, Arora is often in the place his family fears most: police custody. Last February, the NYPD picked him up in the throes of another manic episode in lower Manhattan. Arora told police that he needed to go to the hospital because he didn’t have his medication. Arora was brought in handcuffs to the Mount Sinai Beth Israel emergency room where he said officer Blair Butler struck him in the head and cut open his ear so badly that he was stitched up in the ER.
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