Emanuel Lutchman (Part 7)

Fragments of a future narrative

I find it difficult to track Emanuel’s life. His terms in and out of prison, his sentences and paroles—I can’t see them in sequence. It’s chaos.

But there is a timeline: sent to Attica in 2006, at 16; “released on parole in 2010, but returned to prison three times in the next three years.” Out in 2013. Then back in jail—in Rochester, in 2015—for “petit larceny and menacing his girlfriend.”

Emanuel somehow built relationships through these years. He married, fathered a son. But it’s not clear where—even if—he worked. He panhandled the Merchants Grill (the bar he targeted). That seems to have been just one of several businesses he’d haunt, begging for money.

Amidst this instability, it’s impossible to imagine him receiving the mental health treatment he needed. On top of his others, there were also mental hygiene arrests. In August 2015, when he visited his grandmother in Florida, it was clear “he had not been on his psychiatric medication.”

His suffering, in these respects, was both personal and emblematic of broader phenomena. “Many people are surprised to learn that we are one of America’s most racially segregated communities,” ACT Rochester wrote in a 2020 report. The group stressed, “we have one of the greatest income disparities in America based on race and ethnicity; we have one of the country’s greatest concentrations of poverty.”

Emanuel checked off every box: Black, poor, unwell. On society’s fringe and, in many respects, wholly alone—with no path forward. Then he met the FBI agent.