Jordan Neely Michael Jackson Impersonator dies at age 30

Leonard Greene: Daniel Penny showed no humanity before choking Jordan Neely to death on subway

Let’s call him the Bad Samaritan.

After Daniel Penny, a white subway passenger, subdued and choked a menacing Black homeless man, Jordan Neely, to death last year on a Manhattan train, two weeks passed before Penny was arrested.

If the roles had been reversed, Neely would have been in handcuffs before the next train rolled into the station.

Instead, Penny, 26, has been hailed as a hero in some circles, with more than $3 million in donations made to his legal defense fund. Opening statements in his manslaughter trial were delivered Friday.

Neely’s family, meanwhile, has struggled with his loss and with ongoing attempts to demonize the victim, even in death.


“The manner in which the defendant permanently silenced Jordan Neely evinced the defendant’s belief that Mr. Neely didn’t deserve even the minimum modicum of humanity,” Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran told jurors during the opening statements at Penny’s trial in Manhattan.

Penny, a Marine veteran, was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after Neely’s death on May 1, 2023.

Witnesses said Penny intervened when an agitated and unhinged Neely, a subway and street performer, boarded an uptown F train and began threatening passengers while telling them he was hungry and thirsty.

Cops said Penny grabbed Neely from behind in a chokehold, pulled him to the floor of the subway car and continued to hold him while two others helped restrain him.

By the time emergency personnel arrived, Neely was dead.

Prosecutors said Penny held Neely, 30 in a chokehold for six minutes, even after he was no longer a threat.

Video showed he stopped moving after five.

“His initial attempt was even laudable: to protect fellow New Yorkers from a perceived threat,” Yoran said. “But deadly physical force is permitted only when it’s absolutely necessary and only for as long as it’s absolutely necessary, and here the defendant went way too far.”

Penny is no hero, and his supporters should stop pretending that he is. He killed a man who wasn’t armed and hadn’t touched anyone on the subway.

Penny’s defenders like to point out that Neely, who had a history of mental illness, had been arrested 42 times in the previous 10 years, most recently in November 2021 for slugging a 67-year-old female stranger in the face as she walked out of a subway station.

But Penny had no way of knowing that before Neely got on the F train that afternoon.

His past did not matter. Neither did Penny’s military record. Ex-Marine or not, he had no right or authority to take another man’s life.

Many would like to believe that race has nothing to do with this case, as if the color of Neely’s skin had nothing to do with his death or how he was perceived by other riders on the train.

If you don’t think this trial is about race, ask Penny’s lawyers why they were accused of scratching so many people of color from the jury.

Prosecutors filed a motion accusing Penny’s defense team of striking certain potential jurors because of their race. At the time, defense lawyers used their challenges to strike at least 10 people of color.

Among them was a Black woman with purple hair. But the defense insisted that rejecting her had nothing to do with her being Black.

They just didn’t like the hair.

No one believes Penny intended to kill anyone when he boarded the train that day on his way to the gym.

But if he had been able, even for 30 seconds, to see the troubled Neely as a person and not as a threat, Neely might still be alive today.

“Mr. Penny was so reckless with Mr. Neely’s life because he didn’t recognize his humanity,” Yoran said.

Donte Mills, the Neely family’s lawyer, was more to the point.

“He used his martial arts training to kill Jordan Neely and did not use his first aid training at all because he didn’t think that Jordan was worth it,” Mills said outside the courthouse.

“He was worth hurting, but he wasn’t worth trying to save.”

www.indianagazette.com/opinion/leonard-greene-daniel-penny-showed-no-humanity-before-choking-jordan-neely-to-death-on-subway/article_84fcfa02-0348-5d55-82cf-151e85b79c84.html

Opinion: The Killing of Jordan Neely and Why Police Should Also Be Held to Account

Black America Web – The trial of Daniel Penny – the white, former Marine who killed Jordan Neely, and whose military training taught him just how to do it, began today. Led by Editorial Director, Bruce C.T, Wright, NewsOne has been closely following the story from the very beginning. And from the beginning, there have been a number of troubling questions. My own have centered on the choices made by the police who initially responded to the call for help the day Jordan Neely died.


In brief, on May 1, 2023, Daniel Penny killed 30-year-old Jordan Neely. The two had been riding one of New York’s F-train subway lines. Neely, a gifted and loved dancer and Michael Jackson impersonator who struggled with a mental health disorder, was also a survivor of brutal domestic violence. When he was just 14 years old, Jordan’s mother was strangled to death by her abuser, stuffed into a suitcase and dumped along the highway.

While Penny is finally being held to account for killing Jordan, there are others who are not. There were two other people who allegedly helped Penny as he killed the young Black man. They’ve yet to be named or arrested. Why not?

But neither has anyone in the NYPD. And why not? Their actions that day are a matter of record.

This week in October, and specifically on Oct. 22, has long been internationally recognized as the day and period that people across the globe take a united stand against police violence. What happened to Jordan Neely should be registered as one of those vulgarities.

Because even as it’s true that the police did not administer the chokehold, their actions once on the scene may have made the difference between this case being charged as second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide or the attempt to execute those actions.

Victim Blaming From The Start
When officers arrived and found Jordan incapacitated but still breathing, Penny readily told them he’d choked Jordan.

In a stunning response to Penny’s admission, the officers administered Narcan, a life-saving drug–but for people who have overdosed on an opioid.

Full disclosure: I spent years working with a team of people dedicated to ensuring access to Narcan, including its use by law enforcement. Narcan saves lives, period. I have nothing negative to say about it.

On the other hand, how can we not question the bizarre choice by police officers to use Narcan as the primary method used to support the dying victim? From the killer’s own mouth, Jordan had been strangled, causing him to lie near death upon the officers’ arrival, not the known use of an opioid. Armed with that information, police still chose to waste precious minutes that should have been used doing a breathing assessment when they found Jordan still alive, although barely.

Recently retired New York City physician, Dr. Barbara Zeller, a long-serving and board-certified internist who took their medical degree from Columbia University College Of Physicians And Surgeons in1971, said had she been called to the scene, knowing the young man had been choked, the appropriate first response should have been “to undertake a breathing and airway assessment, and check the patient’s cardiac status.”

“In a case in which a person has been harmed in this way, the immediate action must be to support and sustain their breathing,” Zeller said to me today, while also noting that Narcan would not have hurt Jordan, but neither would it have helped.

There are unclear reports about the use of CPR on May 1, 2023 as Jordan Neely lay dying. We don’t know when it was employed nor how vigorously. Reports only claim it was used. But given the impact of Narcan taking typically two to five minutes to show up, it seems fair to assume that whatever CPR was done, was done too late.

It also seems fair to question — despite being told otherwise, and despite a freelance reporter being at the scene with a video of what happened, along with other witnesses — why in the world their response was to assume, with zero evidence, that Jordan had overdosed on an opioid.

But with a killer’s confession and videotape to prove it, they still willingly chose to act as though Jordan – not the killer – had been the architect of his own harm.

Police do not always have to pull the trigger or administer the chokehold to cause — or help cause — a person’s death. Their own bigotry allowed them to view the Black victim as the villain, and the white killer who said he was exactly that, as the savior.

It allowed them to not arrest the killer until public protest (and the recording) demanded they do so. It took more than a week for them to act, despite knowing what happened in less than five minutes.

And it contributed to the long line of police-supported vigilante violence by white people against Blacks. Law enforcement’s historical tacit support of white vigilante violence, coupled with its contribution to public victim-blaming, has created a climate that, for all intents and purposes, has deputized white people who want to kill Black people.

“It’s a climate that puts Black people who are struggling with mental illness, who are impoverished and unhoused, at an ever increased risk,” offered renowned activist, Monifa Bandele this afternoon. Bandele was a child growing up in New York City in 1984 when the vigilante violence of another white man, Bernhard Goetz, horrified and outraged the Black community.

Jordan Neely was an artist and a young man who had struggled with his mental health since his mother’s murder. He was known to the city’s outreach workers whose mission is to help protect the human beings who comprise New York’s unhoused and often unwell population. The city had him on a Top 50 list of those in most urgent need of assistance.

But as he had been in life, so too in death was Jordan Neely denied the assistance he needed.

At no point should that go unanswered.

atlantadailyworld.com/2024/10/22/opinion-the-killing-of-jordan-neely-and-why-police-should-also-be-held-to-account/