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.

Donald Trump was demanding $400 million from Columbia University.

When he did not get his way, he stormed out of a meeting with university trustees and later publicly castigated the university president as “a dummy” and “a total moron.”

That drama dates back 25 years.

Today, these two New York City institutions — the ostentatious billionaire president of the United States and the 270-year-old Ivy League university that has cultivated 87 Nobel laureates — are locked in an extraordinary clash. The future of higher education and academic freedom dangle in the balance.

But the first battle between Mr. Trump and Columbia involved the most New York of New York prizes — a lucrative real estate deal, according to interviews with 17 real estate investors and former university administrators and insiders, as well as contemporaneous news articles.

Some former university officials are quietly wondering whether the ultimately unsuccessful property transaction sowed the seeds of Mr. Trump’s current focus on Columbia. His administration has demanded that the university turn over vast control of its policies and even curricular decisions in its effort to quell antisemitism on campus. It has also canceled federal grants and contracts at Columbia — valued at $400 million.

The Trump Organization and the White House declined to comment.

Lee C. Bollinger, the former president of Columbia who eventually opted not to pursue the property owned by Mr. Trump and foreign investors, chose instead to expand the Columbia campus on land adjacent to the university. “I wanted for Columbia a much more ambitious project than the Trump property would permit, and one that would fit with the surrounding properties, that would blend in with the Morningside campus and the Harlem community,” he said in an interview.

The clash had its roots in the late 1990s, when Columbia was facing a common challenge in New York: Situated in one of the most expensive and congested cities in the world, it wanted more space. The federal government was supercharging the budget of the National Institutes of Health, and to compete with other universities for research grants, Columbia needed room to house more scientists and labs.

Expanding its footprint beyond its Morningside Heights campus into neighboring Harlem would be complicated. In 1968, the university began construction on a gymnasium in Morningside Park. The design, construction delays and limited access to Harlem residents resulted in “cries of segregation and racism,” according to a Columbia University Libraries exhibit. Tension between the university and community leaders in Harlem persisted for decades.

Columbia officials and trustees hoped to mend the relationship, but they knew they also needed to look for alternatives.

Enter Mr. Trump. Not yet a reality television star, he was then a brash real estate developer, with a love of tabloid press attention. He offered a home for a Columbia expansion, an undeveloped property on the Upper West Side between Lincoln Center and the Hudson River. It was known as Riverside South before he rebranded it Trump Place.

The property was at the southern tip of a much larger 77-acre site Mr. Trump had owned since the early 1970s, a former freight yard that was once the largest undeveloped parcel in Manhattan. In the early 1990s, Mr. Trump had made no progress in developing the site after amassing more than $800 million in debt, most at very high interest rates, and couldn’t afford bank payments on the property.

But in 1994, two Hong Kong investors came to his rescue. They agreed to finance his vision of high-rise residences, with Mr. Trump remaining the public face of the project. He would also seek $350 million in federal subsidies.

Yet Mr. Trump was struggling to decide what to develop on the southern edge. He pursued buyers, including CBS. He boasted that the network was close to a deal for a 1.5 million-square-foot studio on the property.

But CBS eventually balked, deciding in early 1999 to stay put in its studios on West 57th Street.

A few months later, Mr. Trump was hyping the property every chance he could. “My father taught me everything I know, and he would understand what I’m about to say,” Mr. Trump said at the wake of his father, Fred Trump. Then Mr. Trump touted his plans for Trump Place. “It’s a wonderful project,” he said.

By 2000, Mr. Trump had set his sights on a new partner: Columbia, which he had heard was looking for space. A development there would have been a departure for the university. It was more than two miles from Columbia’s campus and relatively small, requiring it to be built up, with towering buildings.

Still, the idea captured the attention of several trustees and some top administrators. For more than a year, they discussed what could become of the land, mostly with officials at the Trump Organization and sometimes with Mr. Trump himself. Mr. Trump even coined a name for the potential development: “Columbia Prime.”

But in negotiations, he frequently changed his demands, even as reports would appear in Mr. Trump’s favored tabloid, The New York Post, claiming that Columbia was close to buying it.

In private, he tossed around numerous prices, topping out at $400 million, according to a Columbia official from that era, a figure that an anonymous source leaked to The Post a few times.

No matter the amount, Mr. Trump said to Columbia officials, the university would be getting such a great deal that it should also rename its business school the Donald J. Trump School of Business.

An administrator rebuffed Mr. Trump’s request. The university does rename buildings, the person told him, noting that its engineering school had been recently named for a businessman who had donated $26 million. If Mr. Trump wished to make such a gift, the person said, there were other officials at Columbia who would be eager to meet. Mr. Trump did not make a donation.

As the discussions dragged on, many people from Columbia grew frustrated with their dealings with Mr. Trump. Still, the two sides set up a meeting in a Midtown Manhattan conference room with the intention of moving a transaction forward.

A few trustees and administrators arrived with a report prepared on their behalf by a real estate team at Goldman Sachs, which attended every meeting between Columbia officials and representatives of the Trump Organization. It outlined what the investment bank considered a fair value for the land.

Mr. Trump showed up late, was informed of the university’s property analysis and became incensed.

Goldman Sachs had assigned a value in the range of $65 million to $90 million, according to a person who was in the room. In an attempt to soothe Mr. Trump, a trustee offered that the university would be willing to pay the top of the range.

It didn’t matter. A furious Mr. Trump walked out less than five minutes after the meeting had started.

The university did not formally abandon a possible expansion on Mr. Trump’s property until after Mr. Bollinger took over as president in 2002. At that time, Columbia had been considering two options: an expansion onto the Upper West Side plot or a move north into West Harlem, where Columbia had started to buy properties.

In his inaugural address, Mr. Bollinger spoke about the university’s need to expand, calling the school a “great urban university” that is the “most constrained for space.”

“This state of affairs, however, cannot last,” he added. “To fulfill our responsibilities and aspirations, Columbia must expand significantly over the next decade. Whether we expand on the property we already own on Morningside Heights, Manhattanville, or Washington Heights, or whether we pursue a design of multiple campuses in the city, or beyond, is one of the most important questions we will face in the years ahead.”

He evaluated the Trump option for a satellite campus and also began to have conversations about mending the fissure with Harlem’s community leaders, and expanding westward, creating a contiguous footprint.

He quickly determined that Harlem, not Donald Trump, was Columbia’s future. “This is an opportunity in Manhattanville to create something of immense vitality and beauty,” Mr. Bollinger told The Times in 2003. “This is not to just go in and throw up some buildings.”

Mr. Trump’s West Side property was eventually developed after the Hong Kong billionaires who owned a majority stake in it sold the entire site for $1.76 billion.

Yet Mr. Trump was outraged. He accused the investors of selling it for far less than what he could have. He sued them for $1 billion in damages. The case was dismissed, with the judge pointing out that the development had sold for $188 million more than its latest appraisal.

If he was underwhelmed by the success of the Riverside South, Mr. Trump had another asset that was appreciating: his own fame.

“The Apprentice” made its television debut in January 2004, and became an instant hit.

But Mr. Trump’s mega-stardom did not make him forget about the failed deal with Columbia.

In 2010 — about eight years after Mr. Bollinger contacted Mr. Trump to tell him the school would be expanding into Harlem — two Columbia student journalists who had written a profile of the university president received in the mail a gold-embossed letter on thick paperstock from a displeased reader, Donald J. Trump.

He included a copy of a missive he had recently sent to Columbia’s board of trustees, in which he called the Manhattanville campus “lousy” and Mr. Bollinger “a dummy.”

“Columbia Prime was a great idea thought of by a great man, which ultimately fizzled due to poor leadership at Columbia,” Mr. Trump wrote.

He signed it with a black marker and scribbled, “Bollinger is terrible!”

Mr. Trump also shared his indignation in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Years after the deal fell through,” the newspaper said, “Trump is still irate. ‘They could have had a beautiful campus, right behind Lincoln Center,’” Mr. Trump told the reporter and called Mr. Bollinger a “total moron.”

Mr. Trump was perhaps staying true to principles outlined in “How To Get Rich,” an advice book he co-wrote a few years after his deal with Columbia went sour.

One chapter is titled “Sometimes You Have to Hold a Grudge.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.