Nelson Cross says he’s living a parent’s worst nightmare.

When his stepsons called and told him that his 16-year-old daughter, Ne’isa Herod Cross, had been struck and killed by a southbound G train he said he was stunned. But the following week became even more surreal when he couldn’t get to the bottom of exactly what happened.

“When I was talking to the actual investigator, he told me one thing, which was that they were walking across the catwalk. And then, you know, four friends were able to get away, but … she was caught up in the train by her book bag and was dragged,” Cross said. “But then, also, there was another report that actually said that she was walking down the tunnel alone.”

Migrants are sleeping in cars parked outside the city's main intake center in Midtown Manhattan as it becomes more difficult to secure a bed.

Gothamist visited the Roosevelt Hotel on Christmas day and Jan. 4. On both days, a reporter saw men sleeping in four cars with out-of-state plates on Vanderbilt Avenue, near the hotel. Food scraps, like discarded pizza boxes and take-out containers, were littered around the vehicles with fogged-up windows. Some of the men declined to comment. But others described their journey to the hotel that one city official has called “a new Ellis Island.”

Hundreds of people were arrested after pro-Palestinian protesters from several advocacy groups shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge and Holland Tunnel for more than an hour during the Monday morning commute, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard said.

Traffic was at a standstill at each of the four entry points to the city beginning at around 9:30 a.m., according to a NYPD spokesperson. By 11:15 a.m., police had arrested protesters at the various protests and traffic had resumed at the city's bridges and tunnel, a police spokesperson said.

In total, the NYPD had arrested 216 people and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey arrested 109, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard told Gothamist on Monday afternoon.

State lawmakers left Albany last summer without taking action on Kyra’s Law, a bill that would reshape child custody decisions in New York by requiring judges to consider a parent’s overall history of abuse or neglect more than the current norm.

Now, supporters of the bill are rallying behind a renewed fight to pass it as the state Legislature reconvenes this month.

“We need it to be the first bill that passes in January,” said Jacqueline Franchetti, whose 2-year-old daughter Kyra — after whom the bill is named — died in 2016. According to investigators, Kyra’s father killed her during an unsupervised, court-approved visit to his house in Virginia, then set the home on fire and killed himself.

Displaced residents of a building that partially collapsed in the Bronx on Monday afternoon recalled a slew of unsavory and unsafe conditions in their apartments, including rats, leaks, and visible cracks in the walls.

“For years we reported, we made so many reports … because the walls inside, I wish I could show you pictures, were just crumbling,” said Melina Ricart, 29, who grew up in the first-floor unit her family evacuated as the seven-story building in Morris Heights began to collapse around them.

Months before a Bronx man allegedly stabbed four relatives to death at a home in Far Rockaway on Sunday and was fatally shot by police responding to the scene, he refused help for severe mental health issues identified by his family, his aunt and cousin said Monday.

Bronx resident Lillian McKoy said her nephew Courtney Gordon — the 38-year-old police named as the suspect in the grisly domestic slaying at 467 Beach 22nd St. — exhibited alarming behavior earlier this year, leading his mother and sister to reach out to mental health professionals to take him into treatment.

“But he, in turn, reversed it and began to tell them they're the ones that need help, he is fine,” McKoy said in the living room of her Eastchester apartment. “He refused to go.”

A 15-year-old Brooklyn boy died on Tuesday morning after he was shot in the back on Monday afternoon, according to police.

Foridun Mavlonov was walking from school on 20th Avenue in Bensonhurst around 1 p.m. when a suspect approached and opened fire, police said.

The teen was transported to Maimonides Medical Center in critical condition and pronounced dead on Tuesday morning.

From the spring of 2020 to 2021, as gun violence was spiking across all five boroughs amid the COVID-19 pandemic, something unusual was happening in a covered backyard of a Crown Heights storefront.

Young people, aged 14 to 24, were trickling in, leaving beefs and street affiliations on the outside. They were paid $30 for their time, and came into a neutral space with potted plants and cozy chairs, where they sat down to answer a fundamental and complicated question: Why do you carry a gun?

Months before Dora Howell was found shot in the chest and buried in a Staten Island home in April, she was a plaintiff before the state’s highest court, where she was suing the city for failing to protect her from domestic violence.

The police are investigating the circumstances behind the death of Howell, 43, and have not named any suspects, but her violent end and accounts of her abuse paint a portrait of a woman who was repeatedly failed by the city’s criminal justice system.

A desperate call for help from a father in the Bronx whose adult son struggles with his mental health ended when responding officers shot his son within 28 seconds of their arrival, saying he had brandished a knife.

The son, Raul de la Cruz, 42, remained unconscious for days after being shot Sunday morning. He was awake Thursday, his family said, and speaking a little.

But as he struggles to recover in a room at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx guarded by the police, his family is asking how a call seeking medical help ended with Mr. de la Cruz in critical condition, shot six times in the abdomen, right leg and his chest, according to his sister, Maisset de la Cruz.