Before Martial Simon fell ill, he was a hard worker and an athlete. He played high school soccer in Newark. In the winter, he shoveled snow to help support his family, his older sister Josette Simon said.
“Each time it snowed, he was so happy,” she said. “And then he comes in from shoveling, showing my mother all of the money, all happy.”
In his 20s, he drove a cab, worked in parking garages and eventually managed several of them, Ms. Simon, 65, said in an interview from her home in Georgia.
But after Mr. Simon turned 30, while he was living with his sister’s family, his behavior shifted. He asked to borrow around $2,000. Another time, she said, he borrowed her car and returned only the key, saying the car had been damaged.
One day, Mr. Simon told his sister people were coming out of the TV and following him. “I tried to sit him down because I know he wasn’t himself,” she recalled.
Around 1995, his mother called the police because he was outside her apartment in East Orange, N.J., shouting at hallucinations. One summer night in 1998 in Manhattan, he held up two cabbies in two hours by putting his hand in his jacket and pointing as if he held a gun, prosecutors said. He was jailed for 18 months.
In 2002, Mr. Simon went to live with Josette in Virginia. By then, she said, he had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She drove him to the hospital for weekly medication shots. He still had delusions, she said, but was too fogged to act on them.
Eventually he returned to New York, and to trouble. He called his sister occasionally from jail or a hospital. Ms. Simon said she did not understand why the system could not or would not help him.
“If you see him, you can tell something is wrong,” she said. “So you lock him up and then you just let him out in the street?”
She last heard from her brother around 2013.