Alex Rotar was one step away from ending it all.
He stood on a ledge on top of a six-floor apartment building in Dyker Heights as officers from the NYPD and the U.S. Marshall’s Fugitive Task Force yelled at him to come down on March 14, 2024, according to court records.
“I’m standing there with a pipe of weed and lighter,” Rotar, 37, recalled during a jailhouse interview on Rikers Island nearly a year later.
The moment was the low point in Rotar’s years-long struggle with Bipolar I Disorder that led to him being in Brooklyn, running from the law, his wife and two children in Pennsylvania.
Months earlier, he had fled to his younger brother’s apartment to avoid an arrest warrant issued after he allegedly made “terroristic threats” to an officer in Pottstown, Pa. The cop had previously arrested him for fleeing from officers for nearly 30 minutes after a traffic stop, court records show.
In Brooklyn, NYPD officers persuaded him to step away from the ledge — and asked him to point them to his psychotropic medication, according to Rotar.
The pills were in a white bag inside the apartment, he told them.
“At first I thought they cared,” Rotar told THE CITY. “They let me take another hit of marijuana before they arrested me.”
But there was also a loaded .32-caliber Browning pistol in the bag, according to the criminal complaint from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. Rotar says he had planned to use the gun to take his life.
Since last March, Rotar has been locked up on Rikers Island and trying to convince the prosecutor handling his case that he’d be better served in some type of mental health program.
He’s one of an estimated 3,000 people diagnosed with some type of serious mental illness languishing on Rikers as his court case slowly progresses.
Of those, 21% have a diagnosis of severe depression or Bipolar Disorder, Department of Correction records show. By contrast, just 6% of the general population in the entire country have that type of diagnosis, according to national government health records.
As he has waited in confinement, Rotar says he was attacked by another Rikers detainee with serious mental illness. The man came up behind him and shoved his face to the floor, alleges a lawsuit against the city Department of Correction filed by Rotar after the incident.
‘Complicated Is Our Deal’
Rotar’s ongoing criminal case touches on several fronts — mental illness, a court system struggling to handle complex cases, and violence on Rikers — that criminal justice reformers say exacerbate harm and lead to repeated trouble with the law.
They contend cases like Rotar’s highlight the need to overhaul how the criminal justice system deals with mental illness — and that some European models promise better conditions.
In Scandinavia and Germany, people with mental health issues or drug problems are automatically diverted from the criminal system into an entirely separate mental health track, where they are given inpatient and outpatient psychiatric care.
“It illustrates the need for more supportive and potentially secure housing or placement options for people, even while they’re awaiting trial or a waiting disposition, or potentially getting into a mental health court or some kind of alternative to incarceration,” said said Courtney Bryan, the executive director for the Center for Justice Innovation, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that was instrumental in creating specialized courtrooms for people with mental illness.
In Pennsylvania, Rotar is facing a parole violation charge and is also wanted for allegedly threatening to kill his arresting officer and the cop’s family, according to court records.
The out-of-state case appears to have torpedoed his chance in Brooklyn of getting his case transferred to the mental health court, where defendants are more likely to be sentenced to some type of rehabilitation program instead of jail.
“The court has limited resources and they are not going to waste them on someone who is going to go right back to jail after or during the program,” said a law enforcement official familiar with his Brooklyn case who asked to remain anonymous due to the ongoing court case.
A spokesman for Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez declined to comment, citing the pending criminal case.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn Judge Matthew D’Emic, who has presided over the borough’s mental health court for 23 years, said he and his team pride themselves on taking challenging cases.
Alex Rotar says he was brought to Rikers Island even though he was suicidal at the time of his arrest, March 20, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg
“Complicated is our deal, right?” he told THE CITY, noting he couldn’t specifically comment on Rotar’s pending case. “I mean, all these cases are complicated. They’ve got varying diagnoses, criminal charges, degrees of criminal history and psychiatric history.”
Defense lawyers and program participants consider the mental health court as a potentially lifesaving offramp for people caught in the criminal justice system and stuck on Rikers.
D’Emic said judges in the mental health court sometimes even coordinate with prosecutors outside of New York City.
“Sometimes they say, ‘Go ahead! We’re not going to spend the money getting them back here.’” he said. “Or we could work in tandem with the out-of-state court to give them updates on how the progress of treatment is going.”
Rotar’s ordeal aside, defendants with mental illness who are charged in Brooklyn have the best chance than those in other boroughs to have their cases transferred into a specialized mental health court, records show.
Brooklyn’s felony mental health court oversaw approximately 250 cases in fiscal year 2022, while Manhattan handled around 75, and. Staten Island handled 44, court records show. Queens had 41.
“We just hired a bunch more case managers to help us keep track of our caseload, which has grown really tremendously in the past couple of years,” D’Emic told THE CITY. “It’s labor intensive, there’s no question about it. But honestly, the Office of Court Administration is putting the money behind it, at least as far as far as Brooklyn is concerned.”
One sticking point remains: currently, prosecutors are typically the ones who decide if a case should be moved to mental health court.
Advocates want to give more power to defense lawyers and judges. Many support Treatment Not Jail, proposed legislation in Albany that eliminates prosecutors’ role as gatekeeper.
The legislation, backed by all the state’s major public defender organizations, also calls for the expansion of who is eligible to have their cases moved to the specialized court.
The measure has stalled in Albany so far. A version of the state bill was first introduced in 2020 by State Senator Jessica Ramos (D-Queens), who is now running for mayor.
Meanwhile, Rotar now has a job behind bars checking on people who are suicidal. Every day he walks up and down cell blocks to make sure people inside their housing units are breathing inside the Otis C. Bantum Facility on Rikers.
He earns $81 a week for the 6 a.m.-to-2 p.m. shift as a Suicide Prevention Aide.
As for his criminal case, he’s in the process of changing lawyers after initially hiring a private attorney from Pennsylvania. He hopes his new lawyer will have more success moving his case into a mental health court.
“I’m willing to be mandated to a hospital where I come and take my meds every morning in the area,” he told THE CITY.
Binges and Paranoia
His legal odyssey is the latest turmoil in a life filled with ups and downs.
Rotar was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was 12 years old.
“We were getting abused as Jews,” he recalled. “My mom had to change my last name, because if you had a Jewish last name, you could get abused even more.”
His mother gave him the Rotar name after her first husband, who wasn’t Jewish.
Like many Ukrainian immigrants, the family moved to an apartment near Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the city’s largest immigration assistance organization.
“We had a lot of family here,” Rotar said, noting his maternal grandfather was already living in the area.
But he struggled in James Madison High School and dropped out at 16.
“I started having mental issues and drug problems,” he said. “I used cocaine and marijuana.”
Alex Rotar holds up a shirt he says shows blood stains from an attack on Rikers Island, March 20, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
He got his equivalency diploma and then briefly attended the now-closed Bramson ORT Institute of Technology, a nonprofit college.
“I failed that,” he said. “I was a mess up for a while.”
Desperate to get his life back on track, he went to an inpatient drug rehab program called the Dynamite Youth Center for two years.
“That was really helpful. It basically changed my life,” he said.
Afterwards, a friend from the program helped him land a job as a sales person in Manhattan’s Diamond District “making great money.”
At 21, he fell in love and married a fellow Ukrainian immigrant who also moved to New York as a kid.
“We came up from nothing,” he said, noting his wife now works as a certified public accountant.
He switched jobs and worked in sales and business management for T-Mobile for 10 years.
In around 2017, the couple moved to Pottstown, Pa, and lived what seemed like an idyllic life with his parents residing next door. They had two children and he opened three coffee shops.
“It was Turkish coffee. Something different for the area,” he said.
Then COVID hit.
Customers were locked down and business slowed. At the same time he decided to run for office as a state lawmaker and eventually for Congress as well.
Veteran local politicians took offense and “wanted me out,” he claims.
During that time, he also claims he randomly saw a group of cops beating a young Black woman and taped the incident with his phone.
“I stopped them and told them it was wrong,” he said. “After that everything went to sh-t.”
He says the police harassed him afterwards and he began to have multiple mental health “episodes.” At one point sped away in his Mercedes from cops during a traffic stop. He was also busted for a gun, court records show.
He did 14 months in jail in Pennsylvania.
“I stopped taking my medication,” he recalled, noting a doctor several years ago prescribed Lexapro, Abilify, and also briefly Lithium.
“Once I’m on my medication, I’m like, this perfectly normal person, once I’m off my medication, yeah, shit goes for shit,” he said.
Before he was locked up, he said he would go on “binge runs” where he didn’t sleep for around a week straight. He also spent a lot of money and at one point bought a random person a car, he added.
“It turns me into a person I don’t ever want to be,” he said.
That happened again in Pennsylvania when he went off the medication. He ducked his parole officer and fled to his brother’s apartment in Brooklyn. He also said he thought the officer who arrested him was trying to kill him.
“I was paranoid,” he recalled.
Bryan, from the Center for Justice Innovation, said Rotar clearly needs help but jail isn’t the answer.
“What really is a tragedy is this false choice that we put ourselves in that you either have to send someone to a death trap like Rikers or nothing,” she said. “What if he was identified as someone with a mental health need and a treatment plan could be put together while the DA was considering what to do with the case?”
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
The post One Man’s Year on Rikers Exposes Limits of Mental Health Reforms appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
