A man accused of stealing power tools from a hardware store died in a holding cell at a Brooklyn courthouse just before his scheduled arraignment on Friday, according to court records and the police.

The man, identified as Soso Ramishvili, 32, was being held in police custody at the Kings County Criminal Courts Building in Downtown Brooklyn. He faced charges of petty larceny and possessing stolen property and cocaine, the authorities said.

After his arrest on Tuesday, Mr. Ramishvili was scheduled for an arraignment on Wednesday morning. But the hearing was postponed several times this week and rescheduled for Friday morning, court records show.

Then, just before Friday’s scheduled appearance, Mr. Ramishvili was discovered unconscious by the police at 8:25 a.m. Emergency medical workers were called to the courthouse and pronounced him dead, the police said.

The cause of Mr. Ramishvili’s death was not immediately clear. But the police said he had been taken to the hospital multiple times after his arrest on Tuesday.

Still, his death has caused outrage among lawyers and public defenders as well as renewed criticism of the treatment of people accused of crimes in New York City.

“The callous disregard that law enforcement continues to show towards New Yorkers is deeply shocking,” the Legal Aid Society and Brooklyn Defender Services, two public defense organizations, said in a joint statement on Friday. The groups also called for an “urgent, thorough and independent” investigation into the matter.

Mr. Ramishvili did not have a lawyer because he had not yet been arraigned, Legal Aid said.

The authorities said that a security guard saw Mr. Ramishvili take power tools and other items from the shelves of a Home Depot in the Old Mill Basin neighborhood of Brooklyn on Tuesday morning, hide them under his jacket and walk out without paying. The guard, who noticed Mr. Ramishvili on surveillance footage, said he had stolen goods valued at $213 from the store, according to the authorities. He was also carrying a vessel of cocaine at the time, they said.

Four other people have died this year in city jails or just after being released from custody.

On Thursday, a woman who was being held at the Rikers Island jail complex was pronounced dead after being discovered unresponsive, according to the Department of Correction.

Earlier this month, Ariel Quidone, 20, who had been accused of robbery, died in a hospital after collapsing in his Rikers cell. Two other men who were being held in New York City jails died within the same week last month.

In an interview on Saturday, Anna Papava, a friend of Mr. Ramishvili’s, said that he had moved to the United States from the country of Georgia about two years ago. Mr. Ramishvili worked sporadically for the food delivery platform DoorDash, she said.

He lived with a woman in Brooklyn and the two had a daughter together. But the couple had recently split, Ms. Papava said.

Since then, she said, Mr. Ramishvili had been struggling and his behavior had begun to worry his friends and family.

“He had some problems,” she said. “Mental problems.”

Ms. Papava said members of Mr. Ramishvili’s family knew he had been arrested on shoplifting charges this week. But they learned he had died only after detectives knocked on their door on Friday and informed them.

Ms. Papava said Mr. Ramishvili’s father, who lives in Brooklyn, checked into the hospital with symptoms of a heart attack after hearing the news. She described his mother, who lives in Germany, as heartbroken.

Family and friends are desperate to learn how and why Mr. Ramishvili died, Ms. Papava said.

“We are shocked,” she said. “What’s going on? Nobody knows nothing.”

Maria Cramer contributed reporting.

The plan was to transform two of New York City’s busiest crossings for cars into “Bridges for the People,” an idea that Bill de Blasio, the mayor at the time, said would help New Yorkers exit “the era of fossil fuels.”

He promised to remove one vehicle lane apiece from the Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges to accommodate a pandemic-spurred boom in walking and cycling, a sign of just how far the city had moved away from the car culture that has long dominated its streets.

Four years later, only the Brooklyn Bridge is friendlier to pedestrians. The Queensboro Bridge remains the only city-owned East River bridge without separate paths for pedestrians and cyclists, jamming them instead into a single, overcrowded lane.

Last week, there was hope that the Queensboro Bridge’s time had finally come. City transportation officials were poised to hit send on a news release announcing the opening of a new pedestrian path on the bridge’s southern flank, according to several people familiar with the plan.

The release, which The New York Times obtained, was headlined, “Bridges for People,” and said the project would be “the first bike and pedestrian upgrades to the bridge” since 1979, when the existing walking and bike path was carved from the outer northbound roadway.

City transportation officials even went so far as to invite Councilwoman Julie Won of Queens to a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sunday, March 16. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani of Queens provided a quote for the news release.

But then the mayor’s office scuttled the plan, to the dismay and frustration of the project’s supporters.

Although a city official said the event had been added to City Hall’s internal event-tracker in late February, Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams, said city transportation officials had failed to brief him and his aides about the project before proceeding. She said the mayor’s office had requested data so it can assess how the project may affect traffic in Manhattan and Queens.

She said that “nothing has been delayed, and the mayor and City Hall must be provided a full briefing on how the agency plans to roll this out smoothly and ensure New Yorkers can continue to get to where they need to go efficiently.”

The Brooklyn Bridge was reconfigured in September 2021, before Mr. de Blasio’s term ended. The Queensboro Bridge, however, was undergoing rehabilitation, and Mr. Adams, who has described himself as a cyclist, inherited the project. (Mr. de Blasio did not respond to a request for comment.)

In recent decades, New York City has increasingly carved out room for pedestrians and cyclists on its streets. In December, the Transportation Department celebrated an “all-time high” for bike ridership across the four East River bridges. At the same time, the department committed to doubling cycling and pedestrian space on the Queensboro Bridge in 2025.

Mr. Adams, a self-described working class mayor, has been criticized by transportation advocates for not doing enough for city residents who do not commute by car, which is most of them. His office watered down plans to improve bus speeds along Fordham Road in the Bronx, the busiest bus route in the poorest borough. City officials also scaled back efforts to make McGuinness Boulevard in Brooklyn friendlier to cyclists.

And though it built nearly 90 miles of protected bike lanes in the past three years, an improvement on the de Blasio administration’s final years, the Adams administration has failed to meet the ambitious bus- and bike-lane requirements in the city’s “Streets Plan” law — requirements the transportation commissioner recently told the City Council were “not realistic.”

With Mr. Adams’s poll numbers in the tank and the Democratic primary for mayor just three months away, critics have wondered whether the mayor might be trying to quash a project that could draw the ire of drivers and possibly also President Trump, who disdains bike lanes and with whom Mr. Adams has developed a mutually beneficial relationship.

“LOL! What a ridiculous reach by your unnamed ‘critics,’” Ms. Mamelak Altus said in an email.

Mr. Mamdani, who is running to unseat Mr. Adams, said the repeated delays in opening the Queensboro Bridge path were infuriating.

“This administration time and again has politicized basic street safety projects, intervening at the last minute and putting New Yorkers at risk for completely arbitrary political decisions,” he said.

The back-and-forth over the Queensboro Bridge path also suggests a heightened level of disorganization within a City Hall that has experienced substantial turnover since half of Mr. Adams’s deputy mayors resigned in February.

The bridge, which was completed in 1909, once carried trolleys alongside cars. The crossing is now used by 170,000 vehicles a day, officials said.

A growing number of cyclists and pedestrians must squeeze onto the 11-foot-wide lane on the bridge’s outer northbound roadway. More than 7,100 cyclists and 2,700 pedestrians use the path every day.

There have been 19 crashes reported on the shared path since 2022, according to city officials. On the Manhattan Bridge, which has distinct pedestrian and cycling lanes, there were 14 in the same period. The city did not provide similar statistics for the two other East River bridges.

In October, Daniel Bach, a lawyer, was jogging over the Queensboro Bridge when he was hit by a scooter. He ended up in intensive care with fractured eye sockets and a broken nose.

“Bottom line, clearly, cyclists and scooters should be on the other side of the Queensboro Bridge and not sharing that little path with the runners,” said Mr. Bach, 62, who lives in Long Island City, Queens.

Ms. Won said city officials had contacted her office on March 10 to invite her to the ribbon-cutting six days later. They told members of her staff that a news release would be issued on March 12.

But four days after the initial contact, city officials told Ms. Won’s office that the ribbon-cutting would not happen, she said. The delay was first reported by the transportation-focused website Streetsblog.

At a City Council hearing this week, Ms. Won pressed Transportation Department officials about the status of the Queensboro Bridge project.

“We were told by D.O.T. that the construction was complete,” Ms. Won said. “So did they misspeak?”

In response, a transportation official disputed that characterization but could not provide a precise timeline for when it would be finished.

“It will happen this year,” said Ydanis Rodriguez, the transportation commissioner. “Very soon.”

On a recent afternoon, the new walkway beckoned from behind a fence, while on the existing walkway, a skateboarder weaving around a stream of pedestrians clipped one.

Corey Zeigler, a cyclist, longs for more space on the bridge. Not long ago, Mr. Ziegler, a 32-year-old construction worker, crashed on the Queens end of the bridge and nearly lost his left ear.

An Astoria native, he has watched the area’s skyline become crowded with high-rise apartment buildings. That has made the neighborhood, and the shared pedestrian and bike path on the Queensboro Bridge, “10 times more crowded and dangerous” than it was a decade ago, he said.

“What is the reason for it being held up?” he asked. “If it’s political, we shouldn’t stand for it.”

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

Well before political leaders were taking action against cellphones in the classroom, the superintendent of schools in Schoharie, N.Y., a rural district about 40 miles west of Albany, was well along on his crusade against Big Tech’s commandeering of the adolescent mind. By the beginning of the school year in 2022, David Blanchard, who had been appointed as superintendent seven years earlier, had implemented a bell-to-bell policy. This meant that students could not use phones (or smart watches or earbuds) at any point during the school day — not during lunch or study halls or periods of transition from one class to another.

The effort certainly seemed extreme. This was before Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” spurred consensus about the destructive impact phones were having on teenage mental health, before the former surgeon general’s call for warning labels on social media platforms. Mr. Blanchard was troubled by all the disconnection he was seeing. His experiment yielded benefits right away.

“We found a transformative environment,” he told me recently. “We expected kids to be in tears, breaking down. Immediately we saw them talking to each other, engaged in conversation in the lunchroom.”

One unanticipated outcome was that students flooded counselors’ offices looking for help on how to resolve conflicts that were now happening in person. Previously, if they found themselves in some sort of fight with someone online, they would have called or texted a parent for advice on how to deal with it, Mr. Blanchard told me. “Now students were realizing that their friends were right there in front of them and not the people on social, a few towns away, that they had never met.” Enrollment in elective classes also went up when the option to scroll your way through a 40-minute free period was eliminated.

The success in Schoharie has been a showpiece in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent campaign to ban cellphones in schools across New York. At least eight other states, including Florida and Louisiana, have instituted restrictions of varying kinds. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Phone-Free School Act requiring every school district in California to devise a policy limiting the use of smartphones by July 2026. This week a suggested cellphone ban was the subject of a public hearing in the Texas State Legislature, where a bill was introduced with bipartisan support a few months ago by a young member of the House who lamented that she had been “born into these devices.”

Governor Hochul’s proposal follows the Schoharie bell-to-bell approach. In a rare instance of agreement between labor and government, it is supported by the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City schoolteachers. As Michael Mulgrew, the president of the U.F.T., put it, “It is simple, and everyone knows what the expectation is.”

Still, the proposal’s all-constraining formulation has not made it an obvious or easy sell. Introduced in January as part of the state’s current budget negotiations, it is opposed by some groups like the state’s School Boards Association. These groups favor an alternate strategy coming out of the statehouse that endorses the notion that local jurisdictions ought to have say in how policy limiting phone use is devised.

Studies comparing students with and without cellphones in classrooms generally show better academic performance among those without. The advantage of keeping devices out of students’ hands for the entire day is that it both reduces the time teachers have to waste policing phone use and also minimizes the possibility that whatever erupts on Snapchat during lunchtime will kill any chance of paying attention to the “Moby-Dick” discussion in the afternoon. In Schoharie, students put their smartphones in a pouch with a magnetic lock — the kind used in stores to prevent theft — which cannot be opened until a school attendant releases them at the end of the day.

In recent years, parents around the country have demanded more and more control over what their children are reading and doing in school. The constituents most opposed to all-day phone bans are the mothers and fathers who seem to be addicted to constant filial contact. Governor Hochul has spoken to aggrieved first-grade teachers who told her that they are overseeing classrooms full of children wearing smart watches. “Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, ‘I miss you and can’t wait to see you,’” the governor told me. “That’s a parental need,” she said, “not a student need.” The continuation of these patterns, she worried, was bound to keep children from emerging as fully functioning adults.

It is the sadly all too reasonable fear of many parents that something catastrophic could happen at school without their being able to reach their children. It is a fantasy that communication would save them. Throughout the rollout of the proposal, the governor’s office has had law enforcement come in and speak with school groups to explain how misguided a notion that is. In an emergency, phones distract children from remaining focused on whomever has been entrusted to keep them safe; calls and texts create added panic.

Should the governor’s proposal pass, it would take effect in September. Parents in Schoharie were quite resistant to the ban at first, Mr. Blanchard told me. But they came around when they realized that with the addiction broken, it became much easier to manage their children’s digital lives at home — and much more gratifying to see them engage with the world without staring at their hands.