What an outrage.
Without calling a grand jury, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — otherwise so soft on crime as to be Play-Doh — has indicted Daniel Penny of second-degree manslaughter in the subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, a charge that carries up to 15 years in prison.
To be clear: Neely did not deserve to die. No one deserves to die like that.
But to watch the mob rule on display, the craven politics behind Bragg’s decision, and the media coverage depicting Neely as your friendly neighborhood Michael Jackson impersonator, his death a racist lynching, is to despair.
Neely had more arrests than birthdays: 42 charges at 30 years old, so mentally ill that he was on New York City’s ‘Top 50’ list of homeless in dire need of help.
He was arrested in 2015 for attempting to kidnap a 7-year-old girl after he was ‘seen dragging [her] down an Inwood street,’ the New York Daily News reported.
That’s a detail you won’t find in most media coverage.
Nor this: Neely had an active warrant out for his arrest, having skipped out on a court appearance in connection with his attack on a 67-year-old woman.
Without calling a grand jury, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — otherwise so soft on crime as to be Play-Doh — has indicted Daniel Penny (pictured outside Manhattan court on Friday) of second-degree manslaughter.
To be clear: Neely did not deserve to die. No one deserves to die like that. (Pictured: Perry holds Jordan Neely in a lethal chokehold).
Even New York City’s mayor Eric Adams, a black former transit cop, has called for calm and due process.
As the expected voices on the left whipped out the gasoline and matches — Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez swiftly adjudging Neely as having been ‘murdered’ — Adams implored New Yorkers to let the investigation play out.
‘I don’t think that’s very responsible at the time where we are still investigating the situation,’ he said of AOC et al. on CNN. ‘Let’s let the DA conduct his investigation with the law-enforcement officials . . . I’m going to be responsible and allow them to do their job and allow them to determine exactly what happened here.’
If only Bragg could be trusted.
But no: Like a character straight out of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, he’s racializing this tragedy rather than upholding his pledge to ‘guarantee both fairness and safety.’
Speaking of fairness and safety: Anyone who has taken the subway in New York knows that it has, since Covid, become a de facto homeless shelter. ‘Fairness and safety’ apply to those who terrorize, maraud and attack — not the hardworking, law-abiding citizens of this once-great city.
Commuters are mere interlopers, hoping to get from Point A to Point B without being shoved on to the tracks, stabbed, slashed, or trapped in a car with a mentally ill homeless person who is aggressive at best, violent at worst.
The cops won’t do anything, and Daniel Penny is Exhibit A as to why: What officer in this climate wants to risk a manslaughter charge?
That’s why you’re more apt to see them down in the subway system scrolling through Instagram than making arrests.
Getting randomly assaulted on the train — that’s become the cost of doing business in New York.
Jordan Neely boarded the F train on the afternoon of Monday, May 1 at the Second Avenue stop in downtown Manhattan. Eyewitness Juan Alberto Vázquez said that Neely started ‘yelling that he was tired, that he didn’t care about going to jail.’
To watch the mob rule on display, the craven politics behind Bragg’s decision, and the media coverage depicting Neely as your friendly neighborhood Michael Jackson impersonator, his death a racist lynching, is to despair.
Neely (pictured receiving CPR on the subway train where he died) had more arrests than birthdays: 42 charges at 30 years old, so mentally ill that he was on New York City’s ‘Top 50’ list of homeless in dire need of help.
Neely took off his jacket and threw it to the floor with such force that you could hear the zipper clang. ‘The people who were sitting around him — well, yeah, they were scared,’ Vázquez said, ‘and they stood up and moved around the train car’ while Neely continued ranting.
Here’s the truth according to ‘1619 Project’ author and New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones: Neely was killed, she tweeted, ‘for being mentally ill and yelling at people.’
Roxane Gay wrote a column for the Times with the headline ‘Making People Uncomfortable Can Now Get You Killed’.
Gay blamed ‘the people’ — multi-racial, as we know — ‘in that subway car [who] prioritized their own discomfort over Mr. Neely’s distress.’
Tell that to the 66-year-old eyewitness who came forward the night before Penny’s arraignment.
According to her, Neely said, ‘I would kill a motherf***er. I don’t care. I’ll take a bullet. I’ll go to jail.’
She and her fellow passengers, she said, feared for their physical safety: ‘Mr. Neely was […] threatening the passengers. If he did not get what he wants.’
She said she thanked Daniel Penny for intervening.
But three other men were videotaped intervening as well — one holding Neely’s arms down, another helping as Neely tried to escape. Two of the men on video are white; the other appears to be black.
If Penny can be charged without calling a grand jury, why haven’t these men also been charged with a crime?
Why, too, don’t we have Neely’s toxicology report?
Three other men were videotaped intervening as well — one holding Neely’s arms down, another helping as Neely tried to escape. Two of the men on video are white; the other appears to be black. Why haven’t these men also been charged with a crime?
New York City’s mayor Eric Adams, a black former transit cop, has called for calm and due process. But as expected, the left have whipped out the gasoline and matches: Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez swiftly adjudged Neely had been ‘murdered’.
We know he was schizophrenic. We know he had a history of drug use. We know he was prone to violent, unprovoked outbursts and assaults.
After Penny’s indictment on Friday, Neely’s family, through their attorneys, said that passengers should have asked Neely, ‘What’s wrong? How can I help you?… No one said, “Here, sir: Let me meet your need”.’
Neely’s family is grieving deeply, to be sure. But that remonstration to fellow New Yorkers is as absurd as it is tone-deaf. The few witnesses who have spoken about being in that subway car were terrified by Neely’s behavior.
The onus should not have been on them.
Neely was so erratic that even his own family members admit they couldn’t handle him at times.
To wit: there was Neely’s attack on Filemon Castillo Baltazar, 68, while he waited for a train in June of 2019.
Baltazar supports Daniel Penny.
‘Who knows what [Neely] might have done to other people,’ Baltazar said.
Indeed. Two years later, Neely was arrested for randomly punching 67-year-old Anne Mitcheltree inside an East Village deli.
The police ‘told me we have him, he’s in custody, we’re going to press charges,’ Micheltree told the New York Post. ‘I thought the judge would have forced him to take psychiatric meds, but it seems like he bounced out.’
That’s Alvin Bragg’s New York for you: turfing career criminals out on the streets — the same 10 criminals responsible for almost 500 crimes, according to Mayor Adams — and pursuing flimsy, flashy, headline-grabbing, virtue-signaling cases such as Trump paying off a porn star and a military veteran attempting to protect fellow riders.
Neely was so erratic that even his own family members admit they couldn’t handle him at times. (Pictured: marine veteran Daniel Penny).
After Penny’s indictment, Neely’s family, through their attorneys, said that passengers should have asked Neely, ‘What’s wrong? How can I help you?… No one said, “Here, sir: Let me meet your need”.’ They’re grieving deeply, to be sure. But that is as absurd as it is tone-deaf.
That’s Alvin Bragg for you: pursuing flimsy, flashy, headline-grabbing, virtue-signaling cases such as Trump paying off a porn star and a military veteran attempting to protect fellow riders.
Bragg is a disgrace. He stokes racial enmity at the cost of justice.
His lassitude endangers everyday New Yorkers who are simply trying to get to work or school without fear of attack. He does the city no favors by indicting Penny without a grand jury. Of parading Penny on a perp walk in cuffs.
Would Bragg have dared do the same had the victim here been white and the restraining individual black?
I think we all know the answer.
Neely punched another 67-year-old woman — notice a pattern here? — as she exited a station in November 2021, giving her a broken nose, a fractured eye socket and ‘substantial pain to the back of her head.’
Yet here’s our pandering, pathetic New York governor Kathy Hochul, insisting that Neely was killed for ‘being a passenger’ and that it was ‘very clear that he was not going to, you know, cause harm to these other people.’
We can’t hear from ‘these other people’ who were in that subway car soon enough. Daniel Penny can’t afford for them not to come forward.
All these preening politicians with their calls of ‘lynching’ and ‘murder’ should take a seat and kindly shut up, because they don’t take the subway. They don’t have to. They can call an Uber anytime they feel like it.
It’s the working people of the city, the ones who live in public housing and work night shifts and can’t afford private car services, who suffer.
A tragedy like this was inevitable, the result of the complete capitulation to lawlessness, the homeless, the mentally ill and career criminals.
The blood and the blame belong not to Daniel Penny but to New York City alone.
