Jordan Neely was shouting threats on the NYC subway. Fellow passenger Daniel Penny put Neely into a chokehold and killed him. Journalist Anand Giridharadas believes both males felt deserted. Above, protestors rally in support of Neely in New York City on May 24, 2023.

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

disguise caption

toggle caption
i

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

On May 1, 2023, an unhoused Black man named Jordan Neely boarded the New York City subway. For years, Neely had drawn crowds with his Michael Jackson impersonation, but on that day he was in disaster, shouting threats and horrifying fellow passengers.

A white former Marine named Daniel Penny stepped in, placing Neely into a chokehold for six minutes, killing him. Later, a video of the encounter divided the nation. To some, Penny was doing what the police weren’t there to do. To others, Neely was a sufferer, another Black man whose life had been handled as disposable.

Journalist Anand Giridharadas spent more than two years investigating what the video could not present. He needed to write a story “that would take us to the heart of America and what it means to live in this country, in this moment.” When tragic tales become social media fodder, Giridharadas says, “human beings become caricatures.”

In December 2024, Penny was acquitted of criminally negligent murder after a jury hung on a second diploma manslaughter cost and the prosecution dismissed it. Within days of the verdict, Vice President-elect JD Vance invited Penny to the Army-Navy recreation alongside President-elect Trump. Soon afterward, a Silicon Valley enterprise capital agency gave him a job.

In his new e-book, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, Giridharadas posits that both males felt let down by the methods that should have protected them.

“I think Jordan Neely had felt abandoned for a very long time, and had reason to feel that way,” Giridharadas says. “Daniel Penny would claim that he felt abandoned in terms of law enforcement not being there, and in terms of all the systems that had allowed Jordan Neely to be in that subway car in that condition instead of all of the other conditions that he might have been in had there been a better system of care.”

Giridharadas says it’s that sense of abandonment that leads folks to take issues into their own arms, usually with tragic outcomes: “I think it behooves us to think about the condition in which we’ve left people, this sense of abandonment that we’ve allowed to be so pervasive that decent people feel like maybe there’s no other route for folks besides just DIYing it.”

Interview highlights

On Jordan Neely’s legal report and the metropolis’s try at rehabilitation

He had a report of interactions with the police that went back more than a decade. But it was very trivial stuff at the starting. It was primarily the stuff of what it takes to be homeless in New York, leaping turnstiles, sleeping tough. And then in more current years, it had gotten more severe and he’d dedicated a couple of violent crimes, assaults, punching a lady in the face, issues like that. And he had gone to Rikers. He’d been charged. And then as half of this various to incarceration program — and there are packages like this popping up around the nation, where of us get an various to going to jail that is thought-about more restorative, more in line with truly serving to folks who have substance points or other points — he gets to avail of one of these packages. Prosecution, protection, they all agree. And he gets despatched to this variety of rehab facility in the Bronx instead of jail. And one day, he just walks out of that facility.

And then, in April 2023, just a few weeks before he died, he is [at] Coney Island, one of the terminal factors on the subway system, and he’s performing erratically on the platform. Outreach staff strive to deal with him to no avail. The cops have some interplay with him, but they do not truly notice that it is the man who is out with a warrant for his arrest because he walked out of this program. And the outreach staff who were there that night time do not fairly notice that he’s a man that their company knows very nicely, just perhaps not these particular person staff. And he kind of runs off into the night time. And a few weeks later, he’s lifeless on the ground of a totally different subway automotive.

On Daniel Penny’s origins in West Islip, Long Island

These cities in central Long Island have this very sophisticated relationship [with New York City]. … On the one hand, it’s very out of the metropolis, but it’s proper there. Lots of folks commute in every day for work. Some do not. These are cities that were largely populated by white flight in the last several a long time. … In many methods, these are cities that are virtually like middle-class refugee camps from the squalor and terror of New York City.

Maybe even understanding immigrant tales is a more useful framework for understanding these locations. … Immigrants have very sophisticated relationships with the locations they depart. We do not think about that with locations that are 45 minutes away from a metropolis, but I truly think that is the manner to perceive the city in which Daniel Penny grew up. … These are communities where there’s usually a contempt, usually barely hid, for all the folks one needed to get away from, when one left.

On whether Penny confirmed regret

I can’t know what’s in his coronary heart. I did not sense that variety of disappointment or regret. And not only did I not essentially decide that up in that temporary dialog we had at his victory occasion a yr and a half after the incident, but one of the issues that’s putting in both the bodycam video on the scene when they first get there, as nicely as the interrogation … is that even in these moments, overlook regret, he does not even appear to have curiosity about what may have occurred to that man.

On Penny’s MAGA recognition 

He kind of gave the impression of a variety of blankness, ideologically. And that was one of the issues that then turned very unusual, that all these folks actually needed him to be their image and projected onto him all these concepts. And then he, of course, willingly embraced it. He embraced the cash that came from it. And then, most dramatically still, at the finish of the case, not only was he content material to seem with JD Vance and Donald Trump at the Army-Navy recreation, but shortly thereafter, he got a job provide that gobsmacked many folks. This is someone who, I think, has not graduated from faculty. He was supplied a job as a companion at the enterprise capital agency in Silicon Valley called Andreessen Horowitz. … He was made companion on their American dynamism workforce, which is a workforce that invests in startups that do weapons methods and drones and other issues supposedly in the nationwide curiosity.

On the politicization of the case and parallels with Luigi Mangione 

I had spent the last yr and a half listening to Daniel Penny’s folks make an argument that was principally like, “The system wasn’t there, the system wasn’t responsive. Daniel Penny stepped into a void and did what he had to do, took matters into his own hands because of this void.” And then in the jury deliberations during that second was the Mangione assassination of Brian Thompson, of United Health Care. And as that case began to become higher recognized, a related argument began to develop around Luigi Mangione, this time on the components of the left instead of components of proper that Luigi Mangione was stepping into this void of a merciless healthcare system and stepping in because so many folks were deserted and he felt deserted. …

And then Hawk Newsome, Black Lives Matter activist in New York, says, sure … if they’re gonna have vigilantes, we want Black vigilantes. But we also want to make our own faculties, we want to have our own media, we have to have our own everything.

And I just thought to myself, gosh, is this the last variety of widespread thread? The concept that you could hear on the far proper, the far left, and elsewhere that we’re deserted, the system’s rigged, no one’s listening, take issues into your own arms. The sense of, somebody step up. Somebody do something.

Anna Bauman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey tailored it for the net.