Mr. Talented

Mr. Shaw said on his blog that he planned to place his neck in a noose tied to an elevator at the bottom of a shaft. The next person who pushed a button to send the elevator up would, he wrote, “murder me without even knowing it.”

Days later, his body was found. It was a sad, violent end to a short, promising life. On his blog, he had admitted to the attacks and had blamed being rejected by Asian women for committing them. He had tried to talk to nearly 1,500 in less than 350 days, he wrote, and none had said hello: “I just couldn’t understand why Asian Women didn’t find me attractive.”

A friend recalled Mr. Shaw saying he had been found to have bipolar disorder, but could not afford the medicine to treat it. Mental health records obtained by The New York Times from 2013, when he was in jail on Rikers Island, did not show him reporting any manic symptoms, only a history of depression.

Regardless, Mr. Shaw lived two lives. In the real one, which he rarely discussed, his mother had abandoned him as a child, family members said. He spent his teenage years in a boarding home. He squatted as an adult in storage areas and the basements of buildings on a seven-block stretch of the Upper East Side. He spent months in jail for petty crimes. In the fictional one, which he shared with most people, he was from Canada. He disappeared for months at a time because he was traveling the world. He rubbed shoulders with famous people.

“That’s why we thought he was so nice, because he was from Canada,” said Holton Desprez, 25, who met Mr. Shaw in 2008. “I felt he was a wealthy black kid, that he was really doing well.”

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