An earlier Daily News headline (5/2/23) was “Brawling NYC Subway Rider Dies After Chokehold, NYPD Says.”
Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused Black man, appeared to be in the throes of a mental health crisis and asking for money on a New York City subway train when another passenger—a 24-year-old white man—put him in a chokehold for several minutes, killing him.
The dozens of other passengers in the car of the northbound F-train did not stop the attack, although in a witness video, one bystander can be heard warning Penny he was “going to kill” Neely. The video also reveals some passengers cheering, while two other men stood above Neely, holding him down while Penny choked him for several minutes until he went limp.
The death was ruled a homicide. The killer’s name, Daniel Penny, was not released to the media for four days. Penny was not charged until May 11, ten days after the killing, and after protests took place across the city demanding that he be arrested. He was charged with second-degree manslaughter, but released on $100,000 bond. A fundraiser on a right-wing Christian crowdfunding website called GiveSendGo has raised more than $2.5 million as of May 19.
‘A man in pain’
Roxane Gay (New York Times, 5/4/23) raises questions “about who gets to stand his ground, who doesn’t, and how, all too often, it’s people in the latter group who are buried beneath that ground by those who refuse to cede dominion over it.”
Neely, who often busked as a Michael Jackson impersonator, had a history of mental illness and trauma. Before he was killed, he was reportedly yelling on the train, complaining of hunger and thirst and throwing his jacket down in a way some witnesses described as aggressive.
“I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up,” a witness quoted Neely saying. “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.”
No witness accounts suggested he was physically violent. Even so, much of the corporate press deliberately refrained from framing Neely as a victim, and far-right media outlets have gone even further to dehumanize him and excuse the killing.
An opinion piece by Roxane Gay for the New York Times (5/4/23) rightly grouped this killing in with other recent wannabe vigilante–style assaults: 16-year-old Ralph Yarl shot for ringing the wrong doorbell in Kansas City; 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis fatally shot for pulling into the wrong driveway in upstate New York; competitive cheerleaders Heather Roth and Payton Washington shot after one got into the wrong car in a parking lot in Texas; a father and four members of his family—including an 8-year-old boy—fatally shot for asking his neighbor to stop firing an AR-15 assault rifle in his yard.
Gay writes of Neely:
Was he making people uncomfortable? I’m sure he was. But his were the words of a man in pain. He did not physically harm anyone. And the consequence for causing discomfort isn’t death, unless, of course, it is.
Dehumanization
The New York Daily News (5/2/23) announced Neely’s killing under the headline “NYC Man Threatening Strangers on Manhattan Subway Dies After Marine Corps Vet Put Him in Chokehold.” The lead made it clear that his killer was to be understood as the “good guy” in this story:
A disturbed man threatening strangers on a Manhattan subway train died after getting into a brawl with the wrong passenger—a US Marine Corps veteran who put him in a chokehold.
Of course, Neely didn’t “get into a brawl” with Penny, who by all accounts approached Neely from behind. But this framing of Neely as the instigator of violence was common.
New York Times columnist David French (5/14/23), suggesting that Neely’s death was fundamentally a failure of the “rule of law”—not because of Penny’s vigilantism, but because of the city’s failure to keep Neely behind bars for more than 15 months after a 2021 assault charge—called Neely “reportedly aggressive and menacing.” French’s only evidence of this characterization was Neely’s yelling about needing food and water and being ready to die.
As Neely’s killer knew nothing about his arrest record, Newsweek‘s headlining it (5/4/23) suggests the magazine thinks it should affect how sorry we should be that Neely is dead.
Piling on the dehumanization, Newsweek (5/4/23) published an article centered on Neely’s prior criminal record: “Man Killed on Subway Had 42 Prior Arrests.” While quoting homeless advocates who condemned the ways poor and homeless people are demonized and dehumanized, Newsweek simultaneously framed the piece in a way that demonized and dehumanized Neely, relying on law enforcement accounts.
Sara Newman, director of organizing at the housing justice group Open Hearts Initiative, told Newsweek:
Jordan Neely’s murder is the direct result of efforts to dehumanize and demonize New Yorkers who are experiencing homelessness, living with mental illness or just existing in the world as Black and poor.
But Newsweek‘s piece overall did just what Newman condemned, citing a “police spokesperson” who outlined Neely’s arrests between 2013 and 2021: four for alleged assault and others for low-level crimes and crimes of poverty, including transit fraud, trespassing and violations like having an open container in public.
Activists quoted in the article called out the NYPD’s willingness to disclose Neely’s entire record as an attempt to vilify him and justify his killing, but that didn’t stop Newsweek from leading with the police narrative.
At the time of publication, Penny’s name had still not been public, but nearly a decade of Neely’s prior arrests that had nothing to do with the incident that got him killed were headline news.
‘Was this heroism?’
Reporting on Neely’s death being ruled a homicide caused by the chokehold, NBC New York (5/4/23) still managed to pose the question: “Was this heroism, or vigilantism?” The report described Neely’s killer as someone “initially hailed as a Good Samaritan.”
FoxNews.com (5/4/23) reported that demonstrators chanted “Fuck Eric Adams” and implied that was because the New York mayor had said “that the DA should be given time to conduct his investigation.” In fact, protesters were angered because, as FAIR (6/25/22, 12/7/22, 4/4/22) has documented, Adams’ policies have stigmatized homelessness and mental illness, while inflating police budgets and cutting funds for education—and doing little to make people safer.
New York Times (5/4/23) and NBC (5/4/23) headlines also referred to the killing as a “Chokehold Death.” Even well-intentioned reporting that highlights the demands of protesters is eclipsed by the passivity in this language. If a chokehold causes someone’s death, it’s more than just a death; it’s a homicide.
Gay’s piece for the Times put it best:
News reports keep saying Mr. Neely died, which is a passive thing. We die of old age. We die in a car accident. We die from disease. When someone holds us in a chokehold for several minutes, something far worse has occurred.
A ‘debate’ of their own design
USA Today (5/18/23) suggests that one way to look at Neely’s killing is that a “former Marine” drew “accolades” for “choking him into submission.”
USA Today (5/17/23) illustrated the “Grand Canyon-size rift between the left and the right” in how people view the death of Neely:
A former Marine stops a violent homeless man from harassing subway passengers, choking him into submission and drawing accolades for his willingness to step in.
A well-known Black street performer who struggled with mental health and homelessness for years dies at the hands of a white military man in front of horrified onlookers.
The headline online was, “An Act by a ‘Good Samaritan’ or a Case of ‘Murder’: The Rift in How US Views Subway Chokehold Death.” In print, “Chokehold Death Hardens Stark Divide” says the same thing in fewer words: The value of Jordan Neely’s life is up for debate.
The New York Times (5/4/23) also both-sidesed New Yorkers’ opinions on this killing, calling it a “debate”:
For many New Yorkers, the choking of the 30-year-old homeless man, Jordan Neely, was a heinous act of public violence to be swiftly prosecuted, and represented a failure by the city to care for people with serious mental illness. Many others who lamented the killing nonetheless saw it as a reaction to fears about public safety in New York and the subway system in particular.
And some New Yorkers wrestled with conflicting feelings: their own worries about crime and aggression in the city and their conviction that the rider had gone too far and should be charged with a crime.
It later explained, “Many have grown worried about safety on the subway after experiencing violence or reading about it in the news.”
But the overwhelming majority of riders have not experienced violence on the subway themselves. As FAIR (12/7/22) has pointed out, one’s odds of being the victim of a crime while riding New York City public transportation is approximately 1.6 out of 1 million. The NYPD’s own statistics show transit crimes essentially flat for the past 10 years, excluding the dramatic drop during the pandemic, when ridership plummeted. On the other hand, if you follow the news, you’re virtually guaranteed to hear about supposedly rampant subway crime—meaning the fear of rising crime in the city and the subways has been almost entirely manufactured by the news media itself.
‘Paths crossing’
The New York Times (5/7/23) describing a killing as “paths crossed” recalls its reporting (11/23/14) a police officer shooting an unarmed man in a stairwell as “two young men” who “collided.”
A later Times piece was titled “How Two Men’s Disparate Paths Crossed in a Killing on the F Train” (5/7/23). In true Times-style storytelling, a man killing another amounts to “paths crossing.”
“Was this a citizen trying to stop someone from hurting others? Or an overreaction to a common New York encounter with a person with mental illness?” mused the paper of record. The article explained that the type of chokehold Penny used resembled one taught in the Marines. The Times reports the maneuver is meant to cut off blood and oxygen to the brain but not crush the windpipe (it did). It quotes a Marines press release from 2013 that describes choking techniques as a “fast and safe way to knock out the enemy” (1/31/13).
Characterizing Penny’s chokehold as a generally harmless maneuver gone wrong is irresponsible. Chokeholds like the one Penny used are designed for combat—not the subway. In 2021, the Justice Department banned the use of chokeholds by federal law enforcement agencies unless lethal force was authorized. In a piece for Military.com (5/9/23), Gabriel Murphy, a former Marine who started a petition to prosecute Penny for Neely’s death, explains that these martial arts methods Marines learn in training are “not designed to be non-lethal or safe.”
Unlike much coverage of unhoused murder victims—of whom there are many—the article did offer some humanizing details about Neely’s life: that his mother was murdered when he was 14, and that a former high school classmate remembered him as a good dancer and a well-behaved student.
But it then focused on his record of arrests and use of K2, a potentially dangerous form of synthetic marijuana, and his voluntary and involuntary hospitalizations over the years. The paper paraphrased a hospital employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “because they were not authorized to discuss his history.” In other words, the employee was granted anonymity to violate patient privacy laws and air Neely’s personal medical history.
Meanwhile, a “surfing friend” of Penny got the last word in the piece: “He could only guess at Mr. Penny’s mind-set: ‘Knowing Danny and knowing his intentions, it was to help others around him.’”
Right-wing depravity
“The rhetoric from Mr. Neely was very frightening, it was very harsh,” the New York Post (5/18/23) quoted an anonymous bystander. “I sensed danger.”
Right-wing media coverage of Neely’s death reached yet another level of depravity. “Shocking Video Shows NYC Subway Passenger Putting Unhinged Man in Deadly Chokehold,” read one New York Post headline (4/2/23). In the piece, the victim was described as a “disturbed man” and a “vagrant,” while the person who killed him for yelling on the subway was a “subway passenger” and a “Marine veteran.”
The Post quoted freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez, who captured the video of the incident. “I think that in one sense it’s fine that citizens want to jump in and help. But I think as heroes we have to use moderation,” he said, adding that if police had shown up earlier, “this never would have happened.” (The Post did not challenge this suggestion that police are not notorious choke-holders themselves—see George Floyd, Eric Garner, Elijah McClain.)
Fox host Brian Kilmeade (Media Matters, 5/4/23) justified the killing, saying the other passengers who “felt threatened” “helped out,” too. He added that Neely had prior arrests for “assault, disorderly conduct, fare beating.”
“I can’t tell you how many times you see this guy—these guys—walking up and down screaming, and you think to yourself, this can be out of control at any moment,” Kilmeade said. He added:
You have a 24-year-old who we trained in the military, lives on Long Island, hopping on a subway, and said, let me help out the American people again, when I’m not in Afghanistan, let me just grab this guy and hold him down. No cops around, because they are understaffed and they are not on the trains. They are upstairs. And this guy takes action. And now you have people protesting for the homeless guy? Were you protesting when he was throwing garbage at people and threatening people in their face? So, I have no patience for these people.
Assault, disorderly conduct, fare beating, throwing trash and disrupting passengers are not punishable by the death penalty in a court of law—and certainly not by a subway passenger who decided to play judge, jury and executioner on his afternoon ride. No matter how short on patience Kilmeade is for people he sees on his commute to his $9 million/year job, Jordan Neely was a human being.
Mental illness is not a crime
Additionally, Adams’ police “omnipresence” plan deployed more than 1,000 extra officers underground in early 2022. Despite record levels of police underground, the April 2022 subway shooting that injured at least 29 people still happened. Officers on the platform that Michelle Go was fatally shoved off of that same year didn’t stop her murder, either.
In April 2023, the NYPD reintroduced a $74,000 robotic police dog to spy on people in Times Square. Meanwhile, the city’s department of education may lose $421 million in additional budget cuts next school year (Chalkbeat, 4/4/23).
It can’t be repeated enough that mental illness and homelessness are not criminal, and that the demonization of both things are leading to policies and prejudices that cost lives. Homelessness and mental illness are both conditions that make someone more likely to be victims of crimes, not perpetrators (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 1/24/22; NIH, 1/9/23).
But as the corporate media has demonstrated with Neely’s story, even a victim of homicide is framed as guilty when he is Black, unhoused and mentally ill.
“Assault, disorderly conduct, fare beating, throwing trash and disrupting passengers…”
What you can expect when riding the New York subway.
If you’re white, suck it up.
If you’re black, keep it up.
The DA’s got your back.
This is an inappropriate remark, to say the least. Nobody needs somebody like you on the subway. Jordan Neely was senselessly murdered. It’s like a personal loss to all of us. We White people are NOT being taken advantage of by Black people. It’s always been the other way around. Neely was hurt by his mother’s murder, but also by racism. He didn’t get the care he needed. He shouldn’t be dead or even injured. If he made people uncomfortable, somebody could have simply held his arms. And dialed 911. That’s all. That’s all. No more bad attitude on anyone’s part. A person with an attitude like the one you expressed is dangerous.
“I have been riding the New York City subways almost daily for over 20 years now, other than for about a year during the pandemic. And I can testify that these days, about once every week one can expect to be in a car with a person, almost always male, who is actively menacing other passengers. I know these men can’t help it. Many are without homes and not in full control of their faculties. I suspect that they are often lonely and part of what they are doing is seeking some kind of human connection — to be mentally ill can be to find even negative attention a kind of solace compared to no attention at all.
But the problem is that in seeking this negative attention, these men are often not plangent but furious. They walk up and down the subway car yelling into individual faces. They stomp. They ball their fists. They curse. These are not just troubled supplicants who occasionally get a little pushy. They are men who make you genuinely afraid that you are about to be assaulted. And in my experience these men are most likely to be directly confrontational with women. It’s worth noting that while the majority of Neely’s more than 40 arrests by the N.Y.P.D. were for minor infractions, three were for assaulting women in the subway system.
Men in a state of potentially violent agitation are now so common on the subway that I am wary of having my daughters, ages 8 and 11, ride with me, especially after an incident when one such man singled us out and I had to quietly instruct my girls to keep their eyes down and not move.
…As to the pairs of cops now so common in the subways, I have never seen them do a thing about these men. This includes an instance when I explicitly asked a couple of police officers to intervene when a man was trawling the cars threatening to beat up one person after another, each potential victim looking up helplessly, wondering whether he meant it. It was especially hard to watch when he got to a Latina mother with two small kids.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/opinion/jordan-neely-subway-death.html
So you’ll be in favour of the USA introducing universal health care, publicly funded, free at the point of delivery, which would include humane mental health care for the USA’s many working class men and women who are deeply scarred by their experiences. In the UK, it’s called the National Health Service. You will also be in favour of introducing social housing for all, with rents affordable for all. In the UK, that’s called council housing.
The alternative is the chaos and violence you see in the USA caused by the ruling class’s imposition of capitalist structures.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0X7vBB8SggA
pathetic
There’s not a word of truth in your comment. As the above article makes clear, most riders on the NY subway rarely encounter violence or other forms of misconduct. Mr Neely was also a passenger, a rider, a member of the public. He was in trouble, he clearly had long standing problems with his mental health, yet you and many others treat him as inferior to yourselves, as less than fully human. White people in NYC can expect the police and the criminal justice system to treat them with some degree of courtesy; Black people know from childhood they cannot.
You obviously are not a subway-riding New Yorker.
Well, okay. If the NYC subway has so many mentally ill, homeless men using it as temporary shelter, New York City clearly has serious, systemic problems caused by the imposition of capitalist politics and economics by its ruling class. The solutions are, obviously, entirely socialist in nature, including universal health care and social housing for all who need it. I’m sure you agree. The alternative is for the city (and the nation) to descend even further into armed, violent chaos.
Yea ?? Well BS and you clearly don’t live or take the NYC subways recently. I have, for around 25 years and I have seen a 360 change in what is tolerated on the trains. Its the wild, wild west now (rather once again) and can report several times in any given week one can expect to be in a car with a serious and often a lunatic person. Get off your high horse and simply review how many subway riders have been attacked and sometimes killed. Since the pandemic alone there have been countless incidents of the ‘crazy’s’ pushing people on to the subway tracks. Often they die BTW. Its tragic and sad what occurred here yet – but make no doubt about it – the ‘system’ failed as the NYC mentally ill are are running rogue not getting the attention they require. This dude may have saved lives here but we will never know for sure.
As I have replied elsewhere on this thread: it is clear that the imposition of the brutally exploitative, capitalist system on NYC people, as across the USA, has been catastrophic for its working class, leading to high levels of mental ill health and homelessness. The solution, obviously, is not for subway riders to attack and kill each other, but socialism: universal health care, publicly funded and free at the point of delivery, along with widespread availability of social housing made affordable for all who need it. I’m sure you agree that would be better than more cops to kill working-class Americans.
These people don’t care about you, or the subway riders.
They have a Narrative to protect, NOT actual working class human beings trying to get to their jobs and back home safely.
Who are “These people”? I assume you mean the ruling class of NYC such as Mayor Adams whose rhetoric and actions are helpful towards his wealthy cronies while ignoring the daily exploitation and miseries of the working class by their employers, landlords and other capitalists. NYC subway riders, which included the late Mr Neely and Mr Penny his killer, need the benefits of socialism and democracy, not more well-paid police to make their lives even harder.
Who are these people? Rebecca, Olivia, et. al.
They ignore the “miseries of the working class” caused by subway terrorists like Mr. Neely in order to spout bromides about capitalism and racism.
Can we talk about the brutal “dehumanization” of Areanah Preston?
I’m interested in your exculpatory exegesis:
A subway terrorist is a victim, and these four thugs are ___________________ .
What a travesty. Well I suppose the Marine should have known that grabbing a person from behind and chocking him could be said to have caused the death.
The Marine was much bigger than the victim—-could the Marine have held him just as well as he was standing behind the man anyway? He could have held the man’s arms tightly—— Did he have to do a choke hold?
He killed a man—-a man who was held down until he died. But then, seeing all the deaths, and arrested men in Iraq holding dogs which seemed to be primed to attack and to be trained for awfulness from the Bush war in Iraq—– should anyone be surprised?
And even more sad, if a Black man had put a White man in a choke hold—–oh wait we did see that Florida wanna- be security guard who murdered the young Black man in Florida—-and that white man got away with murder didn’t he.
Sometimes I am amazed with how so many White men get away with murder—and I am a white person. We are so, so , so far from being that “more perfect union……”
People seem to have selective or short memories. It wasn’t that long ago a NYPD officer choked out Eric Garner for selling “loosies” (single cigarettes). The officers punishment was he got fired from the NYPD.
I’m a formerly homeless mental patient but I’m also an activist, and I am privy to a lot of very hopeful developments. I can tell you that if the mental health system hadn’t revolved around a very wrong-headed modus operandi since the 1950’s, Jordan Neely would have been able to derive far more benefit from it than he did. Perhaps he’d still be alive and doing well, as would be the other throngs of mental patients who died along with him.
By being lenient to his KILLER, like the situation in SF with the security guard- they are showing support for extra-judicial american vigilantism; done by cops/security/bullies dealing with objectified “undesirables”.
That’s whats not being talked about. A subtle support for this behaviour.
The democrats, whom I support too- some are too lazy to out-think the problems like the progressives are trying to do, through a BETTER system. They are lazy. They want the problems to take care of themselves.
AND the only way we are getting out of this is by fighting both the republican “we sell unfairness, but badly” and the democrats, who are afraid to take on challenges in communicating highly under educated social issues to the American people.
They (Democrats) also lean towards supporting rich people in big business (way too often) rather than the 300+ million Americans who need them to NOT put up with extra-judicial american vigilantism when it comes to some (or all) of these issues.
Jordan needed that.
These people will all end up in hell. I mean that spiritually.
was he on drugs?