Trải nghiệm cuộc sống đầy bi kịch của Jordan Neely và Daniel Penny trước khi thiệt mạng trong tai nạn tàu điện ngầm.

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Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny had lived very different lives before drowning on a subway train. It was a Monday afternoon, and a 30-year-old man was riding the F train through Manhattan in a daze. He had been a regular subway commuter and a Michael Jackson impersonator, but he had also faced troubles. City workers had tried to help him for years. Inside the same car was a 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran who had dropped out of college, posting online about feeling “completely unfulfilled” and now looking for a job as a bartender in the city.

The erratic behavior of Jordan Neely, who was homeless, resulted in him shouting at other commuters on the train that he was hungry, that he didn’t care about going back to prison, that he was ready to die, witnesses said.

Exactly what happened in the next few minutes is not clear, but ultimately, the former Marine, Daniel J. Penny, put Neely in a chokehold – a move similar to what he was taught in basic training, but with an important difference – and subdued him. Neely collapsed onto the floor in a struggle that lasted a minute and ended his life, causing fury across the city.

Their meeting, caught on video by another subway passenger, once again exposed deep-seated flaws in the way New Yorkers and Americans at large view race, homelessness, crime, and how some seem to be treated differently by police. The former Marine, Penny, who is white, was questioned by police but not charged with killing Neely, who is black.

Was this a citizen attempting to prevent harm to others? Or an overreaction to a routine encounter in New York with a mentally ill person?

As investigators examine moments leading up to Neely’s death, friends and family have described the man he was – optimistic and cheerful despite struggling since his mother’s death when he was a teenager. More recently, he seemed to be suffering from serious mental illness and occasionally exhibited violent behavior.

Less is known about Penny, who has spent most of his time outside New York in recent years.

On Friday, his attorneys, Steven M. Raiser and Thomas A. Kenniff, released a statement. “When Mr. Neely began aggressively threatening Daniel Penny and other passengers, Daniel, with the assistance of others, acted to protect himself, until help arrived,” it read. “Daniel never intended to harm Mr. Neely and could not have foreseen his tragic death.”

Neely’s childhood was suddenly disrupted at age 14. He lived with his mother, Christie Neely, and her boyfriend in an apartment in Bayonne, NJ. (Reached earlier this week, his father declined to comment.) In 2007, Neely’s mother went missing. Her body was found stuffed in a suitcase in the Bronx. She had been strangled; her boyfriend was charged with murder.

“The relationship was crazy,” Neely testified at his friend’s trial when he was 19. “Every day they fought.” Neely attended Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, where classmates knew about his loss. Perhaps to avoid discussing the painful experience, he leaned into his childhood love of Michael Jackson, then becoming a skilled impersonator.

Wilson Leon, 30, a former classmate, said: “Everyone called him Michael Jackson. ‘The Michael Jackson of Washington Irving.'”

“When he would perform he would be really passionate about dancing,” Leon said, “and he was really good with teachers.”

But Neely dropped out, his family said this week. In the years that followed, he appeared on social media telling elaborate staged subway performances in a costume resembling the performer during his heyday.

Leon happened to catch a performance by his old friend – “sometimes on 42nd Street, sometimes on the L train,” he said. “We’d say hi to each other.”

But Neely had others watching him, concerned for his safety.

He was known for years by social work groups that reach out to homeless people on subways and had hundreds of encounters with them, according to an employee of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a nonprofit organization that carries out subway outreach for the city. Neely was on a list that outreach workers call the “top 50 list” – a city-maintained roster of homeless people living on the streets whom officials believe need the most urgent assistance and treatment. He had been taken to hospitals many times, both voluntarily and involuntarily, the employee said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss his history.

Neely had more than three dozen arrests. Many were for transgressions common among homeless people, such as hopping turnstiles or trespassing. But at least four were for punching people, two of them inside the subway system.

Outreach workers noted that Neely had used a lot of K2, a potent and unpredictable synthetic form of marijuana. In June 2019, an outreach worker observed that Neely had lost a significant amount of weight and was sleeping standing up, according to a case note from the outreach worker. Around that

Nguồn: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/nyregion/jordan-neely-daniel-penny-nyc-subway.html

Đó là một buổi chiều thứ Hai và một người đàn ông 30 tuổi đang say sưa trên chuyến tàu F đi qua Manhattan. Anh ấy là người thường xuyên đi tàu điện ngầm, từng là một tài năng đóng giả Michael Jackson, nhưng anh ấy cũng gặp rắc rối. Công nhân thành phố đã cố gắng giúp anh ta trong nhiều năm.

Bên trong cùng một chiếc xe là một cựu binh Thủy quân lục chiến 24 tuổi. Sau khi nhập ngũ, anh ấy đã bỏ học đại học, đăng lên mạng về cảm giác “hoàn toàn không thỏa mãn” và hiện anh ấy đang tìm một công việc pha chế rượu trong thành phố.

Người đàn ông cư xử thất thường, Jordan Neely, là người vô gia cư. Anh ta hét lên với những người khác trên tàu rằng anh ta đói, rằng anh ta không quan tâm đến việc trở lại nhà tù, rằng anh ta sẵn sàng chết, các nhân chứng cho biết.

Chính xác thì điều gì đã xảy ra trong vài phút tiếp theo vẫn chưa rõ ràng, nhưng cuối cùng thì cựu chiến binh, Daniel J. Penny, đã đặt ông Neely vào tình trạng bóp cổ – một kiểu tương tự như những gì ông đã được dạy trong khóa huấn luyện cơ bản, nhưng có một điểm khác biệt quan trọng – và hạ gục ông. anh ta xuống sàn trong một cuộc vật lộn kéo dài một phút đã kết liễu cuộc đời của ông Neely và gây ra sự phẫn nộ khắp thành phố.