The Unraveling of Deven Black: A Medical Mystery

In mid-December 2013, Deven fell in the couple’s backyard, cracking some bones in his neck. He needed surgery and was out of work for a month. After returning to the school, he was suspended without pay for a month, as a result of the investigation that had begun with the student’s complaint against him the previous May. When the suspension ended, he was reassigned to a pool of nonteaching substitutes. He also started to talk to his oldest friend, Martin Mosbacher, about people he had met on the internet who needed his help — including a woman from Ghana named Hilary and an alleged African princess who asked him to open bank accounts on behalf of her family’s cocoa business. 

Friends who had just begun to notice changes in Deven’s behavior wondered whether they had been caused by his accident. But Jill knew they had begun before his fall, and she was getting fed up. She began thinking of ending the marriage. Still, she worried that she might be abandoning a sick man. When she and a close girlfriend went away for a weekend, Jill asked for advice: “What does it say about me if I think he’s really ill and I’m divesting myself of him?” Her friend replied: “You can still take care of him and not be married to him.” 

In February 2014, Jill told Deven she wanted to separate and asked him to move out by September 1. She urged him to get counseling and a neurological workup, and he did eventually see a therapist. But Jill discovered that the therapist knew little about Deven’s internet friends or money transfers. Instead, the sessions were all about the stress caused by the impending divorce. “For somebody who’s a mental health professional,” Jill says now of the therapist, “he clearly had no bull---- detector whatsoever.”

Meanwhile, Deven devoted ever more allegiance to his online friends, most of whom were women — or claimed to be. One night in the summer of 2014, after he had fallen asleep on the sofa with his laptop open, Jill peeked at what he had been typing — an email, as it happened, in which he was providing detailed information to someone about their home equity line of credit. She found other messages that provided access to his credit card accounts. “You can’t even say he was a victim of identity theft,” Jill says. “He was a victim of identity gift.” When Jill confronted him about it, he didn’t seem to understand why she would object. “Look, it’s my life to f--- up,” he said. Any time Jill grew emotional, Deven withdrew, she recalls: “He just sat there, sort of glazed over. I felt like I could rant and scream all I wanted, but it wasn’t really sinking in.”

Around the same time, Mosbacher says, Deven told him he was going to retire and become the financial adviser to a woman in Africa — not that he had a pension to rely on or financial expertise to share. “The really scary part is that he didn’t acknowledge he was putting himself at risk or that his money transfers were out-and-out fraud,” Mosbacher says. Deven was opening accounts in his name to deposit checks from online girlfriends, who then directed him to withdraw money and deposit it in another account specifically for them. But the girlfriends’ checks were fake — a basic scam. “He wasn’t in it for the money,” Mosbacher says. “In his mind, he was helping these women who adored him.”

Part 4: The unraveling

IN THE FALL of 2014, Deven moved into an apartment in the Bronx, and Jill finally told their son some of what was going on. She didn’t want Jonas to think badly of his father, but she also didn’t want him to learn about Deven’s schemes from a newspaper headline. The following January, Deven was arrested for bank fraud and jailed until Mosbacher posted bail. Jill and Mosbacher hoped jail might finally be the wake-up call Deven needed. It wasn’t. After his release, Deven mainly wanted to talk about the people he had met in jail and what the food was like. That April, he was arrested again, this time on federal bank-fraud charges (to which he would plead guilty in July), and Jill and Mosbacher signed a bond for his release. At this point, Jill and others, including Deven’s sister, Loren, begged him, in vain, to get psychiatric help. Some also noticed that his deep devotion to Jonas seemed to have evaporated. Feiner remembers, “When you talked to him about it, it seemed as if his online friends were the most important people in his life. That was truly heartbreaking.”

In May 2015, Deven was evicted from his Bronx apartment and began living out of his Subaru Forester while still holding down his job. In June, Deven confessed to Loren that he was having suicidal thoughts. He was admitted to the psychiatric unit of New York–Presbyterian Hospital, diagnosed with depression and prescribed antidepressants. A week later, he was discharged back to his Subaru.

Could all his symptoms have been caused by a mood disorder? If so, the treatment didn’t seem to be helping. Several weeks after his release from the hospital, Deven called Jill asking for the title to the car, which he sold to pay for a hotel, even though it was worth only a few nights’ stay. When the car money ran out in late summer, he had nowhere to go. He landed at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter, on East 30th Street in Manhattan. In October 2015, he was sentenced by a federal judge for writing bad checks and making bad transfers of $146,000. He had a capable public defender, and a dozen friends wrote testimonies on his behalf to the judge, urging mercy. The judge spared him hard time with a suspended sentence and ordered him to pay back what he had stolen. Some of his friends later regretted writing letters encouraging his release. “This was not a guy who should have been allowed back on the street,” Mosbacher says. “He needed supervision.” 

A month later, Deven traveled to Nyack to meet Jill and sign their divorce papers. He had grown something of a “David Letterman beard,” she recalls. To Jill, Deven seemed blasé, an impassive zombie. As he signed papers to dissolve their 32-year marriage, he could have been filling out a customer-service survey. “It was like he was body-snatched,” a friend says.

Deven asked Jill if she would drive him over the Tappan Zee Bridge to the commuter rail train station, but she had reached her limit of favors to a man who didn’t seem to care about her. “I dropped him at a bus stop in town,” she says. Watching him board that bus was the last time she would see Deven alive.

Part 5: The end of the line

ON JANUARY 25, 2016, Deven moved again, this time to the Boulevard Homeless Shelter in Harlem. His roommate, Anthony White, 21, had spent the previous night at the Metropolitan Hospital Center, under psychiatric evaluation, following an emotional outburst at the shelter; he had reportedly become convinced that people at Boulevard were stealing his stuff. On a few occasions, residents later said, White had delusions and had threatened to kill someone.

Just before midnight on January 27, 2016, Deven Black was found with his throat slashed. White had fled into the night. We’ll never know what happened between these two men whose fates had brought them together in a small room in a Manhattan homeless shelter. White went missing. Two months later, his body was pulled from the Hudson River. 

The police had trouble reaching Jill — initially they tried Deven’s sister, Loren, thinking she was his wife. Jill’s first inkling that something terrible had occurred came when a New York Daily News reporter called to ask for information about Deven, but then, when he realized the police had not yet reached her, declined to say why he had called. The police confirmed her fears a few hours later. “It was awful …” she notes, trailing off. 

After her shock and grief subsided, Jill focused on finding out exactly what had caused Deven’s decline. At one point her research led her to suspect he might be suffering from a form of dementia, and now an expert at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, neurologist Brad Dickerson, agreed to conduct an autopsy on Deven’s brain. 

Jill’s supposition was correct: Deven’s outrageous behavior, Dickerson concluded, could be attributed to a rare but devastating form of dementia — frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. “The best way to describe FTD is to say that the frontal lobe is shriveling up — because the brain cells are dying off,” Dickerson says. It’s estimated that at least 50,000 to 60,000 Americans currently suffer from some form of FTD. Deven’s particular form of FTD, a behavior variant called bvFTD, is marked by a loss of empathy and judgment. 

Three things convinced Dickerson: “First, the story. There aren’t a lot of diseases that could cause that kind of change in judgment and personality.” Second, the family’s history of ALS. Although this wasn’t known when Deven’s mother died, there’s a gene that can cause either ALS or FTD. And 10 months before Deven’s death, his brother, Bret, was diagnosed with ALS, too, and would die from it almost nine months after Deven was killed. The recipe for Deven’s mind’s destruction, then, could have lain in his genes, linked to his mother’s and brother’s related but different fatal illnesses.

Dickerson wasn’t fully convinced, however, until he found, in a microscopic examination of Deven’s brain tissue, a protein called TDP-43, which is considered one of the key markers for this wasting disease of the brain. There is no cure. Even if Deven had received an accurate diagnosis before he died, he could not have been saved. Still, his passage might have been eased. His sister, for example, might have gained control of his finances, something she tried to do but couldn’t without his consent. The family might also have been able to marshal their resources to pay for assisted living and keep him off the street. 

By December 2016, Deven’s life­­ — and his brain — had become a case study at a symposium convened by the Boston Society of Neurology and Psychiatry, a group of doctors and scientists from Harvard-affiliated hospitals and other Boston-area universities. “He’d have loved knowing that these big brains were studying his,” Jill says. She smiles, imagining how Deven might put it: “ ‘You know, I always knew I was Harvard material.’ ”

The other dementias: What to look for

More than 100 conditions can cause dementia symptoms such as memory loss, personality changes and impaired judgment. The most common, Alzheimer’s disease, is tragically familiar. But other dementia causes are harder to recognize. While disorders that lead to dementia may have no cures, timely diagnosis can help families care for and protect patients. Here are some other dementia diseases and where to turn for more information. 

Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD)

• Famous sufferer: Monty Python’s Terry Jones 
• Symptoms: Inappropriate inhibition, loss of empathy, apathy
• Help: Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration

Vascular Dementia 

• Famous sufferer: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
• Symptoms: Easily confused, trouble concentrating, impaired judgment
• Help: Alzheimer’s Association

Lewy Body Dementia

• Famous sufferers: Actor Robin Williams, DJ Casey Kasem
• Symptoms: Alertness, confusion and balance issues; rigid muscles; visual hallucinations 
• Help: Lewy Body Dementia Association

Huntington’s Disease

• Famous sufferer: Singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie 
• Symptoms: Difficulty walking, jerky body movements, trouble speaking clearly, anger
• Help: Alzheimer’s Association

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) 

• Famous sufferer: Soap opera star Barbara Tarbuck 
• Symptoms: Memory and coordination loss, twitching, big mood swings
• Help: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Foundation