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“On Monday afternoon, [Jordan Neely] was yelling and pacing back and forth on an F train in Manhattan, witnesses and police said, when he was restrained by at least three people, including a U.S. Marine veteran who pulled one arm tightly around his neck…
“[Neely] lost consciousness during the struggle. EMTs and police arrived after the train stopped at a station. He was pronounced dead at a Manhattan hospital shortly after… The medical examiner’s office classified Neely’s death as a homicide and the manner as a chokehold, but noted that any determination about criminal culpability would be left to the legal system.” AP News
The right argues that Neely was threatening others who were justified in defending themselves, and criticizes policies that allowed Neely to remain on the streets.
“Juan Alberto Vazquez, a freelance journalist, happened to be in the same car. According to him, Neely began screaming, ‘I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.’ I rode the subway every weekday for four years as a high-school student in the early 1990s, an era when crime in New York City was much worse than it is now, and I never once heard anyone announce that he’s ready to die. If I had, the alarm I felt wouldn’t have been ‘low-grade.’”
Nick Catoggio, The Dispatch
“Jordan Neely had been arrested 44 times — forty-four times — including for assault. The people on the subway, including the Marine, could not have known that, but this fact could tell us something about the way Neely was behaving on the subway that night. A crazy man [acting] in a threatening way and telling people he didn’t care if he had to go back to jail, or died? If you have never been on a subway or other public transportation with someone behaving in that way, you have no idea how frightening it can be…
“What happened to Jordan Neely was a tragedy. We don’t yet know to what extent he was culpable in his own death, to what extent the chokeholding ex-Marine is legally culpable, and to what extent it was just an unfortunate accident…
“I reserve the right to change my opinion as more facts come out. But here is something I’m not going to bend on: every healthy society has to have men like that ex-Marine who are willing to step up and defend the weak from threats.”
Rod Dreher, Substack
“Why was Neely out on the streets?… [His] arrests ranged from drugs to disorderly conduct to fare beating. When he died, he carried an outstanding warrant for assaulting a 67-year-old woman. A bevy of people apparently report that he had attempted to shove people onto subway tracks more than once…
“Commentator Toure tweeted, ‘It is normal to see loud, disturbing mental breakdowns on the NYC subway. I’m not defending that; I’m saying it’s a regular occurrence. What’s not normal is to murder people having loud, disturbing mental breakdowns.’ But short of prophecy, how can those watching such a breakdown, complete with threats against others, know who is harmless and who isn’t? Normally such questions are outsourced to law enforcement. When law enforcement is prevented from doing its job, crime rises—and citizens are forced to engage in acts of self-defense.”
Ben Shapiro, Daily Signal
The left argues that Neely’s death was avoidable, and laments the dehumanization of the homeless.
The left argues that Neely’s death was avoidable, and laments the dehumanization of the homeless.
“Was [Neely] 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… 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.”
Roxane Gay, New York Times
“[The other passengers] had been afraid, one witness later said in an interview, that Neely might have been armed. Many people feel uncomfortable when confronted with someone in an acute crisis. But certain factors can turn an uncomfortable situation into an intolerable one, such as living in a society where anybody could have a gun, where any agitation can boil over into mass murder…
“An irate neighbor slaying five people with an AR-15-style rifle after a noise complaint in Texas; an unstable Coast Guard veteran killing one and injuring four while attending an appointment with his mother in an Atlanta hospital… Killing a mentally ill man on a train… This is the country we have become.”
Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic
“New York City is one of the wealthiest cities, in one of the wealthiest countries, on Earth, and yet many of us just accept that some of us are starving. Some of us are destitute. Some of us—in fact, tens of thousands of us—have nowhere to live. Indeed, it’s so common to see people sleeping on the street that most of us, myself included, develop a practiced, willful blindness to the problem… Our society is sick, and everything about this murder is a symptom of our collective rot.”
Elie Mystal, The Nation
“Earlier this week in San Francisco, a fifty-seven-year-old homeless woman named Debra Hord died after being robbed and thrown to the ground. Last week, also in San Francisco, an unarmed homeless person named Banko Brown was shot and killed by a Walgreens security guard during an alleged shoplifting attempt. Just three days before that, local news outlets released video footage, from 2021, of a man ruthlessly spraying sleeping homeless people on the sidewalks with a can of bear mace…
“As long as homeless people are seen as an intrinsic and existential threat to public safety and a political nuisance, their lives will be devalued and mostly seen as collateral damage in the fight to clean up a city, whether New York, San Francisco, or anywhere poor people have lost the ability to afford rent.”
Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker
