A mumbling homeless woman was left out in deadly near-zero temperatures on a Manhattan sidewalk overnight — with first responders telling The Post they couldn’t help her under city guidelines.
The unidentified woman was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, slippers and two blankets as she clipped her nails, put lotion on her hands and talked to herself while hunkered down on East 34th Street across from NYU Langone Hospital as temperatures neared 0 degrees early Sunday.
She refused repeated offers for help from EMS workers and cops — who explained to The Post they had to leave the shivering vagrant in the extremely dangerous bone-chilling weather because she could answer basic questions — a factor that helps meet the threshold of Dem Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial homeless policies.
“She knew the year, 2026,” a firefighter told The Post. “She knew where she was: New York, Manhattan. She knew who the president is. Since she has mental capacity, there is nothing we can do. We can’t force her to go inside. We can’t kidnap her.
“Some people can survive,” he acknowledged of the situation. “Some don’t.”
An EMS worker at the scene added, “I don’t want to leave her out here.
“My hands are tied.”
The woman was first spotted on East 34th Street by The Post around 9:30 p.m. Saturday and remained there at least till 3 a.m. Sunday — when she took out a broom and began sweeping the sidewalk as the mercury hovered at 3 degrees.
She was still on the street Sunday afternoon.
Mamdani has come under fire for refusing to clear Big Apple homeless encampments and forcibly remove vagrants during the ongoing deadly cold snap, which has killed at least 17 people so far.
On Sunday, temperatures in the five boroughs were colder than in Antarctica, with the first Extreme Cold Warning in 22 years issued for millions in the New York metro area, officials said.
“With freezing temperatures expected again this weekend, I am writing to ask: What measures will be in place to ensure every New Yorker is in a warm place?” Democratic City Councilman Oswald Feliz of The Bronx wrote in a recent letter to City Hall.
“Specifically: Will outreach efforts be intensified to ensure every homeless New Yorker is reached?”
On Sunday, city staffers appeared to be struggling to deal with the weather crisis elsewhere in the five boroughs.
At Queens’ Long Island City High School, which was listed as a warming center, The Post found doors locked and only managed to get inside after ringing a buzzer and waiting.
Inside, there were two NYPD cops and one homeless man who said he came in for food — but the center had no food or water.
At the JFK AirTrain station in Jamaica — a Queens neighborhood overrun with the homeless this winter — Port Authority cops grilled vagrants, with several going back out into the cold.
“[They] keep asking me if I want to go to a shelter,” said a vagrant who identified himself as Cook. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m fine. Just want to come in and warm up, damn it!
“Don’t ask me nothin’ about no one else,” he snapped. “I don’t give a f–k about anyone but me.”
He said he’s been living inside the terminal for more than 60 days.
Nearby, another homeless man lay on the floor, while lines of vagrants lined up outside the station’s shuttered public bathrooms.
On nearby Union Hall Street, 18 people crowded inside a city bus set up as a warming center, but workers said Sunday afternoon that food and water had run out.
“It’s pretty full,” a city staffer said. “The smell is pretty bad, but I’m spraying their hands with alcohol if they let me.
“They all came in on their own,” he said. “One lady even asked for shelter. I put her in contact with the number they gave me. I think she was really just looking for a place to charge her phone.”
Some city workers bizarrely claimed to The Post that it was prohibited from photographing the outside of the bus, even though the vehicle was parked on a public street near a homeless shelter.
When The Post spotted the female vagrant out in the frost-bite-inducing weather Saturday on East 34th Street, it called 311, and an operator said they had gotten “a lot of code blue calls” because of the potentially killer weather.
EMS arrived around 11 p.m.
“I am not homeless,” the woman told the first responders, giving her name as “Ms. Aimly.”
“I have a home,” she said, pointing to bags containing her only possessions.
A paramedic asked, “Is it cold outside?”
She replied, “It’s not cold.
“It’s freezing,’’ she said. “Stop harassing me. I don’t to go to prison.”
Three FDNY vehicles arrived at one point, as well as NYPD cops who stopped by to check on the shaking woman.
An FDNY worker gave her a blanket and hand warmers, which she took but did not unwrap.
“Why don’t you help someone who can’t walk? I can walk. I am fine,’’ she said.
The workers eventually left, saying they could do nothing under the current city guidelines.
But despite the emergency responders’ assessment that she was mentally capable, based on her answers to a handful of basic questions, the woman appeared to slip in and out of coherent conversation.
“That’s not a hospital,” she told The Post, pointing to NYU Langone across the street. “That’s a repost.
“The entire area from 28th to 37th street is a repost,” she blurted out.
The man working behind the counter at the Bread and Butter deli near the woman told The Post that the woman had been living outside the store for three years.
“Sometimes we give her food,” the man said.
When The Post approached her, she said, “I am doing an investigation.”
The mayor’s office did not respond to Post requests for comment Sunday.
https://nypost.com/2026/02/08/us-news/mumbling-homeless-woman-left-to-spend-night-on-nyc-sidewalk/
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