Cory Ash would never have stolen a car for the usual reasons — to keep it or sell it,  said his close friend Brianna Jeffers of Voorheesville.

Ash, who stole a car in Albany, police say, and drove down Western Avenue at 95 miles per hour just before his fatal crash at Schoolhouse Road in Guilderland on April 12, was recently diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to Jeffers. He was 23.

Among men, schizophrenia usually occurs between the ages of 16 and 25, says Cynthia Gayle Wible, Ph.D., who is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and studies the neuroscience behind schizophrenia.

“People think he was a bad person because he took the car. But he wasn’t like that,” said Jeffers, 18, who is a senior at Clayton A. Bouton High School. She believes that Ash must have thought someone was chasing him.

“He must have been going through something in his mind because he was schizophrenic,” she said.

“Schizophrenia is a brain disease, a neurological disorder, just like Parkinson’s is,” said Wible. One of the most prominent symptoms of the disease, she said, is paranoid delusions that “feel very real for the person.” Wible believes that these stem from areas of the cortex being erroneously activated.

Another of Ash’s friends, Alexander Clarkson, 35, who worked with him for months recently at Panera Bread on New Scotland Avenue in Albany, believes that Ash killed himself. “I think he had made a decision, and it was just a question of how,” said Clarkson.

Clarkson suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of childhood abuse, he says. But he himself has a “wonderful support system in place,” he says, whereas Ash “had nothing,” referring to outpatient services.

When Clarkson saw Ash briefly on April 11, hours before he died, he recognized the look in his eye. It was the look of someone who was already off the edge, he said. He had seen it years earlier in his own aunt’s eyes, just before she killed herself. Asked to describe it, he said, “It was almost peace.”

Ash was recently hospitalized in the psychiatric ward of Albany Medical Center for about two weeks; “he got it really severe,” Jeffers said. When she went to visit him in the hospital, “They had him taking medicines, and he was getting better,” she said.

But when he came out, he stopped taking his medications, she said. “He said they took his powers away,” Jeffers recalled.

“He was gone,” Clarkson said of the way Ash seemed recently. “Mentally he was no longer Cory.”

When Ash first emerged from the hospital, he seemed better, but he suffered from having “no support, no outpatient services,” Clarkson reiterated.

“That’s the state of mental health services here in Albany. There’s nothing,” he said.

Clarkson said that a couple of days prior to the event that landed Ash in the hospital, Clarkson went into the Capital District Psychiatric Center and spoke to the security guards about Ash, saying that he was outside, threatening to “go into the street and kill himself,” but that the guards dismissed him, saying, “That’s not our business.”

Jeffers thinks that Ash probably was in the grip of his illness when he took the car, which had been left running and unattended outside a business on the 400 block of Madison Avenue, near the corner of Madison and Lark, said Officer Steve Smith of the Albany Police Department.

Jeffers met Ash about a year and a half or two years ago, she estimated. He wasn’t always “like that,” she said. She said of his mental illness, “Sometimes it comes on in your twenties.”

They had met when he came up one day and started talking to Jeffers and her friend. “He was just friendly. He used to talk to everybody,” she said.

Then the three of them became close and started hanging out regularly.

“It was strange to see him go from basically normal to, all of a sudden, schizophrenia. That was just so weird,” she recalled.

“He thought he was the Lord,” Jeffers said.

Before his illness struck, she said, “He was always the nicest guy. He always used to tell me and my friend that, if we ever got into trouble or anything, just call him.”     

“It was like we were all best friends. We were with him every day,” she said.

In fact, she and her best friend — who she says was, until recently, Ash’s girlfriend — were with him earlier on the night of April 11, hours before the crash. “We were just at the mall with him, a couple of hours before,” she said. “He was acting fine, so I thought that he’d started taking his medication again. Usually he was a little off when we were with him, for the past couple of weeks.”

Ash and the best friend were still talking, Jeffers said, explaining, “They just weren’t together.” She said that she wondered if the shift in that relationship was part of “what triggered it.”

Jeffers learned about Ash’s death in a phone call in the early morning hours after the crash. Ash’s mother called Jeffers’s best friend, who then called Jeffers, very upset. The two women stayed up talking on the phone until dawn.

Jeffers doesn’t think that Ash would have crashed the car on purpose. For one thing, she said, he said things to them that night like “I’ll see you later” and “I’ll talk to you later.” He hadn’t sounded like someone planning to take his life, she said.

Also, she said, the crash itself didn’t seem deliberate. It seemed, she said, like he “missed the turn.” He wasn’t too familiar with the Guilderland area, she said. “He probably thought it was a straight road.”

Jeffers thinks Ash was probably trying to get onto the Northway “so he could go fast.”

According to Guilderland Police, Ash was seen on radar driving 95 miles per hour east on Western Avenue near Crossgates Mall. He then apparently tried to enter the Northway at the Schoolhouse Road on-ramp, hit a guardrail and dragged it into the roadway before careening across the street into the Citizens Bank parking lot, the force of the crash damaging the bank building. He was declared dead later at Albany Medical Center, police said.

Police were looking for him, but not chasing him, at the time, they said, and responded to the scene when they received a report of a crash.

Ash was not working, and did not have anywhere to live, Jeffers said.

He had previously been living in an apartment near Albany Medical Center, she said. But he lost his apartment when the building was scheduled for demolition, as part of the expansion of Albany Medical Center into the surrounding area, to create the Park South apartment and shopping development.

After Ash moved out, he had nowhere to stay, Jeffers said.

Recently, she said, he had returned to another apartment building, also in Albany, where he had lived before. He found empty places to stay in there “just during the night,” she said. He ended up sleeping in the stairwells of that building, she said.

Despite losing his home, he always tried to focus on what he could do for Jeffers and her friend, she said.

He had worked at Panera Bread on New Scotland Avenue near the hospital, his friend said, but his co-workers had called 911 when he started yelling at customers.

That event led to his hospitalization, she said.

“Now that I think about it, I think he probably always had it,” she said of schizophrenia, “but he had his first break a month or two ago.”

After his release, he “hung around” Panera, Jeffers said. His former co-workers gave him food, and sometimes gave him rides.

On Feb. 6, Ash wrote on his Facebook page, which was under the name “Cash Dakid Shogun,” “I love working @ Panera -- feels like my home sometimes … I gotta get this $ tho … times are harder than ever in y life rn … Gotta make something happen.”

Ash wrote rap lyrics, Jeffers said. One post on his Facebook page, from Jan. 30, seems to be an example of his lyrics: “Shit seem perfect but really u b blind, tryna adjust my eyes so I cud read between the lines, thought u winds helped me achieve sumn divine, now I don’t even seem in my right mind.”

A few weeks earlier, on Jan. 16, he wrote, “When I’m alone I have thoughts n dreams of me n mine in my heart … regardless, I’m mostly alone.”

Although she was a close friend and had known Ash since soon after he moved to Albany, Jeffers did not know what had brought him to the area from Brooklyn, where he grew up. He had a sister living here, but he was not living with her. His mother and several other siblings were, she thought, in Virginia. Ash didn’t talk much about his earlier years, she said.

Jeffers did wonder at first, she said, if he might have crashed the car on purpose. She said that one thing Ash had been saying lately was, “I’m on the path to peace.”

That night, when she and their other close friend hung around with him just hours before he would steal the car and crash, he had told them, “I’m almost there.”

She still has no explanation for what he might have meant.

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Friends of Cory Ash’s are invited to attend a memorial service and viewing from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., on Saturday, May 15, 2016, at Saint Leonard’s Church, 765 Putnam Ave. (between Malcolm X and Stuyvesant), Brooklyn.