Dehumanization Killed Jordan Neely—and Dominated Coverage of His Death
Olivia Riggio
 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?'
 NBC's New York affiliate (5/4/23) asks, "Was this heroism, or vigilantism?"
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.
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