Jordan Neely Has Access, But No Advocate
Progressives Who Lament Neely's Death and His Killer's Acquittal Share Some Blame
It’s been over a year and a half since Jordan Neely died at a SoHo subway station at the hands of Daniel Penny, a stranger who restrained Neely in a fatal chokehold. Neely, according to multiple witnesses, had a mental breakdown on an F train, ranting and threatening other riders. Penny used the chokehold to restrain him, holding him in it for six minutes, during which Neely fell unconscious and died.
Neely’s death became the latest flashpoint in the long fight against the extrajudicial killing of black men and women. However, despite triggering some protests in the days after the incident in May 2023, the killing did not lead to the kind of national outrage that Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd did.
Penny stood trial for Neely’s death, facing charges of manslaughter and criminal-negligent homicide. The Manhattan jury acquitted him Monday of the latter charge after the former charge was thrown out because the jury could not render a verdict. Though there were some scattered protests Monday night and Tuesday, the response to the verdict was a collective whimper. The acquittal came as a surprise to some conservatives who expected a jury in a jurisdiction that convicted Donald Trump of 34 felonies just six and a half months ago to convict Penny.
I won’t say for sure whether the verdict was the right one or not. There is likely evidence the jury heard that we were not party to. The defense did a masterful job from my point of view, highlighting Penny’s fellow passengers who said they saw Neely as a threat and throwing the NYPD under the bus by arguing Penny felt he had to keep Neely in the fatal chokehold because police dithered in their response. All of this certainly sowed reasonable doubt in the jury. We can debate all day whether Penny’s response was appropriate in the first place, but that’s a pointless debate now. A Manhattan jury decided the answer to that is “yes.”
What isn’t debatable is that it is now open season on the mentally ill and homeless in public spaces in New York City, and nobody in charge is entertaining any realistic way to deal with it. The same system progressives set up failed to help Neely.
Anyone who has dealt with someone suffering from severe mental illness knows that the disease often robs someone of their dignity and humanity and takes away their ability to make decisions related to their treatment. Someone has to step in and make those decisions. In Neely’s case, no one did. New York City knew who Neely was. He was high on the city’s list of known homeless people with mental illness who needed help. Why didn’t they offer him help?
They did.
Neely was arrested multiple times – 42 times, to be exact. Three of those arrests were for assault, one of which was allegedly for punching an elderly woman. To keep him out of prison, he was enrolled in a program championed by criminal justice reform-supporting progressives that offered him treatment and housing. The same progressives who are pontificating today that Neely was failed by the city and state established and championed this program. Since Neely had the right to decide whether or not to stick with it, he ended up back on the street. All the programs progressives put in place to serve people like Neely failed because Neely himself needed someone to advocate for him and force him to stick with treatment. In a tragic twist, progressives now pretend these treatment options, the ones they put in place in the first place, don’t exist, further undermining their credibility. Progressives cannot even take credit for the few improvements they made to the system because to do so would be to admit failure.
Though the Jordan Neely situation got national attention, it is not the only time there has been a mentally ill homeless man acting up on the subway and ending up dead. Six weeks after Penny killed Neely, another man, Jordan Williams, stabbed a homeless man to death on the J train in Brooklyn. The stabbing occurred after the homeless man allegedly punched William’s girlfriend and harassed several other people on the train.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez filed manslaughter charges against Williams, who is black, but dropped them after a grand jury declined to indict, siding with the defense’s argument that the stabbing was self-defense.
All the programs progressives put in place to serve people like Neely failed because Neely himself needed someone to advocate for him and force him to stick with treatment.
Many progressives have fallen back onto the argument that mentally disturbed homeless people on the subway are just a staple of New York life that people should expect. Indeed, this has always been common in the city. I’m old enough to remember the story of Larry Hogue, the so-called “Wild Man of 96th Street,” a homeless crack addict who for years terrorized Upper West Side residents, even standing trial for attempted murder for pushing a girl into the path of an oncoming bus and serving eight months in prison for vandalizing a car. Hogue was eventually locked away in Creedmoor, a psychiatric facility in Queens. A few weeks after 9/11, I was on a Brooklyn-bound A train with a man who got on and ranted about having a bomb. He got off the train after a few stops and left some passengers, still traumatized about the attacks, in tears.
In the last few years, several high-profile killings at the hands of mentally disturbed homeless people have rocked the city. In 2021, two people were stabbed to death by a homeless man on the same train I rode in 2001 when a disturbed man threatened to blow it up. In 2022, 35-year-old Christina Yuna Lee was murdered in her Chinatown apartment after being followed inside by a homeless man. Lee’s killing rocked the city’s Asian-American community, which had been dealing with a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes for several years prior, often perpetrated by mentally disturbed homeless men. Lee’s murderer had been arrested several times for assaulting other people but was not being held behind bars. New York Republicans used Lee’s murder to highlight their law and order campaign in the 2022 gubernatorial race, and that has helped shift Asian Americans in the city to the GOP and helped cut 20-point Democratic margins statewide in half. That same year, another Asian-American woman, Michelle Go, was killed after a homeless man pushed her in front of the train, one of a slew of fatal subway pushings across the city in recent years. Just last month, a homeless man was arrested for going on a random stabbing spree in Midtown, killing three people.
There’s a limit to how much people are willing to take.
Whether it’s justified or not is irrelevant; these attacks and the fact that since 2020, many were perpetrated by mentally deranged homeless people who would have likely been in jail before bail reform and other criminal justice measures enacted in 2019 led directly to the city’s collective shrug over Neely’s death, and probably to his killer’s acquittal. Yes, Neely deserved to live, as progressives have said since Penny’s acquittal, but Penny isn’t the only one responsible for his death. Those who believe people in need of care should be allowed to wander the subways if they so choose and New Yorkers should learn to cope with it also bear some responsibility. They killed Neely, too, and they aren’t interested in making any further changes, just offering righteous words. After Go’s death, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York) and Nicole Malliotakis (R-New York) introduced a bipartisan bill aiming to expand psychiatric care under Medicaid to allow for more beds in psychiatric facilities. Only three members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus signed on it. Meanwhile, eight Republicans cosponsored it.
It is open season on mentally disturbed homeless people now, and unless progressives get their act together and call for a real solution to the problem – one that will require involuntary institutionalization and treatment for many of these folks – more Daniel Pennys will arise. If progressives want that on their conscience, that’s on them. If they want to wash their hands of it because they’re too enamored with anti-social and self-destructive behavior to think there is a problem, that’s on them.
They should understand that no one will “say their names,” no one will march in solidarity, and no amount of murdering homeless people will trigger the socialist revolution. They can do something productive to help New York City’s mentally ill and homeless, or they can let those who want to allow the extrajudicial killing and extermination of homeless and mentally ill people win the debate.
It’s their choice.
I don't think it's "open season" on anybody. That Penny was prosecuted at all is a deterrent. Another selection of 12 people might have seen things the other way, after all. Who wants to put their life on hold and their freedom at risk to stop a crazy person in the subway or on the street, from threatening somebody?
Where I agree with you is that the public is clearly tired of ceding public spaces to people with mental health issues. That doesn't mean the public lacks compassion. Anybody I'd want to discuss this with believes that Neely should be alive and that Penny never should have been put in that situation. I say that even though I believe it was wrong to prosecute Penny (to the point where I believe Bragg's office should be investigated).
In her opening statement, the prosecutor actually said that New Yorkers "know how" to deal with people having outbursts on the subway or in public spaces -- we know not to make eye contact or draw attention to ourselves, to be aware but ultimately to limit engagement and move on. That description, though practically accurate, means ceding control of public spaces to the person experiencing the most obvious mental breakdown.
People do not actually believe that should be the answer. They believe that when somebody rants that they are going to kill people on the subway that police and social workers will show up to deal with it, in short order. You can't expect people to pretend that potentially violent encounters with mentally hurt people is just a quirk of urban life.
Thoughtful piece overall, but what's your evidence that but for bail reform and other recent reforms he would have been incarcerated at the beginning of this year?
Bail, as you know, is simply a pre-trial mechanism. If he was steered into a program, that would have happened with or without bail reform. Indeed, many of his arrests were pre-2020 when the law took effect. Likewise I'm unclear how speedy trial reform, discovery reform, raise the age, or ending solitary (the chief reforms passed) have any relevance here.
Our system is clearly run poorly and fails people. My uncle worked at Creedmor for decades, and I agree we need a stricter mental health system when people can't care for themselves. But let's not generalize and say "this situation could have been avoided if not for those pesky criminal justice reformers."