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As DA Alvin Bragg Deliberates, NYC Progressives Demand Immediate Charges in Death of Jordan Neely

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People protest the death of Jordan Neely in New York City.
People protest the death of Jordan Neely in New York City, May 5, 2023. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

Marine veteran Daniel Penny applied a lethal chokehold to Neely on the F train last week.

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Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we question the emerging narrative around Jordan Neely’s death, counter Scientific American’s not-so-scientific take on puberty blockers, and cover more media misses.

Another Tragedy, Another Narrative

By now, you’ve likely heard about the death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man who was held in a lethal chokehold by 24-year-old marine Daniel Penny last week.

Neely, who has a history of mental illness, was throwing garbage and yelling that he wanted to die or go to jail because he was tired of having no food when Penny stepped in to restrain him.

The city medical examiner ruled the death a homicide caused by “compression of neck (chokehold).” Protesters jumped onto the tracks at one Lenox Hill subway station over the weekend, blocking subway service while calling for consequences for Penny, who has not been charged with a crime for his role in Neely’s death. Penny was initially taken into custody after Neely’s death on the F train on May 1, but was later released. Now District Attorney Alvin Bragg is considering charges that could include involuntary manslaughter, the New York Post reports.

Penny released a statement through his attorneys on Friday night saying he “never intended to harm” Neely.

Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement last week that “any loss of life is tragic” but added, “There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here, so I’m going to refrain from commenting further.”

“However, we do know that there were serious mental-health issues in play here, which is why our administration has made record investments in providing care to those who need it and getting people of [sic] the streets and the subways, and out of dangerous situations,” he said. “And I need all elected officials and advocacy groups to join us in prioritizing getting people the care they need and not just allowing them to languish.”

But progressives have been quick to label Penny a cold-blooded murderer, stripping the conversation of all necessary nuance about mental health and public safety.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) blasted Adams’s statement, saying: “This honestly feels like a new low: not being able to clearly condemn a public murder because the victim was of a social status some would deem ‘too low’ to care about. The last sentence is especially rich from an admin trying to cut the very services that could have helped him.”

Yet Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives have opposed Adams’s plan to make it easier to involuntarily commit mentally ill homeless people who pose a threat to themselves or others.

The city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, has called for charges to be filed against Penny “immediately.”

“To say anything else is an equivocation that will only further a narrative that devalues the life of a black, homeless man with mental health challenges and encourages an attitude of dehumanization of New Yorkers in greatest need,” he said. City Comptroller Brad Lander tweeted out the definition of “vigilantism” in response to the killing. Both Williams and Lander have spoken out against Adams’s proposal as well.

Adams pushed back against the comments from Ocasio-Cortez and Lander. “Both the congresswoman and the comptroller, the comptroller’s a citywide leader and I don’t think that’s very responsible at the time where we are still investigating the situation,” Adams said on CNN Primetime.

New York governor Kathy Hochul claimed that Neely died just for “being a passenger” on the subway and suggested it was “very clear that he was not going to, you know, cause harm to these other people.”

The Guardian leaned into Neely’s one-time status as beloved Michael Jackson impersonator. “Meanwhile, many were remembering Neely as kind and talented, despite others’ attempts to portray him as dangerous and violent.”

But the truth of the matter is Neely struggled with mental-health issues, including schizophrenia, PTSD and depression, according to his aunt. He had been arrested 42 times, including four times for assault. At the time of his death, Neely had an active warrant for allegedly assaulting a 67-year-old woman in 2021.

Neely was arrested in August 2015 for attempted kidnapping “after he was seen dragging a 7-year-old girl down an Inward street,” the New York Daily News reported. He pled guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and was sentenced to four months in jail. He was later arrested again in June 2019 for punching a 64-year-old man in the face during a fight in a Greenwich Village subway station, the report adds.

Reddit posts unearthed by journalist Andy Ngo show that subway riders had grown to fear Neely even nine years ago because of his erratic behavior. He was also on a NYC Department of Homeless Services list of homeless people who had dire needs, the “Top 50” list, according to the New York Times.

Neely’s uncle, Christopher Neely, told the New York Post his nephew was self-medicating with the synthetic drug K2 after his mother’s murder. Christopher Neely called for the arrest of Penny and the two other subway riders who helped Penny restrain his nephew.

“Three men killed Jordan, not just the Marine. It was a gang killing — period,” Neely said. He said his nephew “got jumped by three hoodlums.”

Adams has refuted reporting that Neely was in a chokehold for 15 minutes before police arrived, saying Thursday that first responders arrived on scene within six minutes of the first 911 call about the unfolding incident.

A three-and-a-half minute long video captured by a witness begins with Neely already in a chokehold. Shortly after, a second rider pins down Neely’s arms. Thirty seconds into the video, Neely begins to flail his arms and try to escape Penny’s grasp. Then the third man enters to help pin Neely to the floor.

More than two minutes into the video, Neely begins going limp. Another witness can be heard off camera telling Penny, “You’re going to kill him now, he’s defecated on himself.” One of the men restraining Neely said it was an old stain on his pants and that Neely was not “squeezing.”

“He’s not squeezing? All right. You’ve got to let him go. After he’s defecated himself that’s it,” the off-camera witness said.

The man holding Neely’s arms down then let go and asked Neely if he could hear him. When Neely failed to respond, Penny released him. Seconds later, Penny and the other man moved Neely into a recovery position. After three minutes and 45 seconds of video, Neely’s body contorted and let out a deep breath. The witness who recorded the video later said, “None of us who were there thought he was in danger of dying. We thought he just passed out or ran out of air.”

Several media outlets and pundits have taken the tragic circumstances as an opportunity to virtue signal.

On The Majority Report, Emma Vigeland claimed the desire to feel safe on public transit is a bourgeois privilege. She recalled being on the subway once when she was seated next to a man who was having a mental-health episode. The man hit her in the face and body while flailing his arms. “The politics of dehumanization privileges the bourgeois kind of concern of people’s immediate discomfort in this narrow narrow instance as opposed to larger humanity and life it’s really freaking twisted,” she said.

Reporter Isaac Bailey wrote in an opinion piece for CNN about “How we all played a role in Jordan Neely’s death on a subway train.” “Though New York City’s medical examiner said the direct cause of death was compression of the neck, I can’t shake the feeling that I was among the indirect causes,” Bailey writes because as a New Yorker he has largely gone “along with the status quo, an acceptance of the routing dehumanization of yellow human beings, fellow human beings like Neely and an estimated 68,900 others.”

“Before he stepped on the F train, most of us had treated him like the walking dead, an empty body life had escaped long before that day,” he writes.

“I’m angry that Neely was killed in front of other riders who did not appear to intervene to prevent his death. I’m just not certain my actions over the past several months were much better than theirs,” he wrote.

Headline Fail of the Week

Scientific American asked the question, “What are puberty blockers, and How Do They Work?” last week.

“Decades of data support the use and safety of puberty-pausing medications, which give transgender adolescents and their families time to weigh important medical decisions,” the article answers.

The magazine goes on to add, “But despite the evidence for the safety and efficacy of puberty-delaying treatments, some lawmakers across the U.S. have spread false claims about the drugs and other gender-affirming treatments as part of their efforts to ban or severely restrict access to health care for transgender people.”

However, some research suggests the use of puberty-blockers can leave children permanently altered, with their bodies failing to develop adequate bone density and other secondary characteristics associated with puberty.

Media Misses

• A Washington Post story about a new Washington Post-KFF poll that found most Americans support “anti-trans policies favored by GOP” conveyed a clear bias, at one point saying that the poll’s finding that “clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affection transgender children . . . offering political jet fuel for Republicans in state legislatures and Congress who are pushing measures restricting curriculum, sports participation and medical care.”

• Randi Weingarten’s claims about her position on school closures again got the Twitter community notes treatment last week, this time because of a misleading by Politifact. The “fact-checker” wrote that Weingarten “advocated for reopening schools with pandemic safety measures. She criticized the Trump administration’s 2020 calls to reopen schools fully, but it’s misleading to claim that she opposed reopening at all.” But the community notes said, “Politifact is misrepresenting Weingarten’s positions. She called attempts to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 “Reckless, callous, cruel. Her union pushed aggressively at the local level. They continued in 2022.”

• ABC News obtained leaked footage of Florida governor Ron DeSantis from a 2018 debate prep session. Despite the story seemingly suggesting the tapes make DeSantis look bad, many Republicans yawned at the release and questioned why ABC believed they were newsworthy.

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