The father of the victim was first to testify. He wore a gray quilted vest, a blue-gray shirt and an expression trying but failing to show nothing. He refused for now even to look at the thickset man charged in the torture and murder of his son.

“Thomas Rath,” he said, when asked to identify himself. The same name as his son. The same as an upstate New York murder case that reflected the struggles of communities to meet the commingled challenges of addiction, mental illness and homelessness.

Drug abuse transformed the younger Thomas Rath from an attentive father with a good job to an addict living under a tarp in an Ithaca homeless encampment so firmly established that it had a name: the Jungle. There, in May 2023, he was handcuffed and beaten, then taken away to be brutalized, shot to death and left in a makeshift grave.

Thirteen people, many of them Jungle denizens, were charged in the case, with the man on trial, Joseph Howell, 38, accused of orchestrating the nightmare. Prosecutors depicted him as a malevolent manipulator who used threats and drugs to get vulnerable people to do bad things.

The trial took place two weeks ago in Owego, in the brick-and-limestone Tioga County courthouse built just after the Civil War. Its only courtroom features a balcony and two slowly spinning fans hanging from the high ceiling. Think “To Kill a Mockingbird.”