Jordan Neely's death in the subway evokes talk of another time in NY

More than three decades before Daniel Penny put Jordan Neely in a fatal chokehold on the F train, New York Magazine published a feature story about what it described as a growing trend on the city’s streets and subways: vigilante justice.

It was 1990, and murders were at an all-time high. There were also more than 100,000 reported robberies, 3,100 rapes and 44,000 felonious assaults, according to NYPD data. A Fox News poll cited in the magazine’s story found 6% of New Yorkers claimed to be carrying guns or knives. Trust in the police was low. And in the span of six months, the magazine reported, at least 10 people had used force — sometimes deadly — against so-called “criminals” and “derelicts.”

“In this primitive atmosphere, all the thorny questions come down to one,” reporter Eric Pooley wrote. “When the police can’t protect the citizens, how far can a citizen go in protecting himself — where is the line?”

Many New Yorkers are asking themselves the same question more than three decades later, after 30-year-old Neely, a homeless man with a history of mental illness, boarded an uptown F train, yelled that he was tired and hungry, threw down his jacket, and was tackled to the floor of the subway, according independent journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez who witnessed the incident. A video Vazquez posted on Facebook showed Neely squirming and flailing until his body went limp.

Neely’s death last week underscores the anxieties about subway crime that continue to proliferate — even in a city that is substantially safer than it was in 1990. A pandemic-era rise in crime and a homelessness crisis in the transit system has compounded those anxieties. The incident has renewed the debate at the center of the magazine story, about when it’s acceptable for ordinary people to turn to violence in the face of those fears.

But the reaction also reflects how much the public conversation has changed since 1990. Advocates and elected officials have used the death as an opportunity to call for more affordable housing and mental health services. They’ve questioned the role that race might have played. There were immediate protests, and more than a dozen people jumped onto the subway tracks over the weekend to call for action.

While much is still unknown about exactly what happened on that train car in the moments leading up to Neely’s death, the details that have surfaced so far — however different in key respects — bring to mind several cases of “vigilante justice” from New York City’s history, when people took matters into their own hands to stop a perceived threat, sparking praise from some and outrage from others.

Neely’s death has divided New Yorkers once again. Many have condemned the actions of the 24-year-old Penny, a white man who once served in the Marines, who is seen in cellphone video wrapping his arms around a homeless Black man’s neck until he was still.

Others, including Mayor Eric Adams, have reserved judgment while the legal process plays out. The medical examiner has ruled Neely died by homicide from compression of his neck, but no criminal charges have been filed against Penny or two other men who appeared to be helping to restrain Neely in a widely shared video that shows a portion of the encounter. Penny’s attorney’s said in a statement that he and other passengers were acting “to protect themselves.”

“Daniel never intended to harm Mr. Neely & could not have foreseen his untimely death,” his attorneys said.

The ‘sympathetic everyman’

Many New Yorkers have drawn comparisons between Penny and Bernhard Goetz, a white man who shot and injured four Black teenagers on the subway in 1984 after one of them asked him for $5. Goetz had been mugged on the subway a few years earlier and feared he was going to be robbed again when he fired an illegal gun at the teens, according to court records.

At first, Goetz earned widespread public support from New Yorkers, who saw him as a “sympathetic everyman,” said Fritz Umbach, a historian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who researched the case for an upcoming book on crime in New York City.

While the subways were safer than the streets at the time, Umbach found that many New Yorkers were afraid of being victimized in the transit system. Out of 2,700 nighttime riders surveyed in 1985, a third of white straphangers and more than half of Black and Latino commuters feared being robbed underground. And that fear drove early approval for Goetz’s actions, according to Umbach and news reports from the time.

“The police set up a hotline, because they think what’s going to happen is that people are going to be outraged by the vigilantism,” Umbach said in an interview. “Instead, they’re flooded with calls of support for him.”

But as people learned more about Goetz and the circumstances surrounding the shooting, public sentiments began to shift. He admitted to firing a second shot at one of the teens that paralyzed him, this after saying: “You don’t look so bad, here’s another.”

Goetz was indicted on several charges, including attempted murder, but was acquitted on all except illegal possession of a weapon. He spent about eight months in jail. The paralyzed teen’s family later won a $43 million judgment from a civil jury trial, leading Goetz to declare bankruptcy. He never paid a dollar, according to the teen’s attorney.

When reached last week, Goetz at first said he wasn’t interested in speaking with Gothamist. But he went on to express his surprise that Neely’s death had become a news story, claiming that 40 years ago, journalists didn’t even report on the killings of many police officers and taxi drivers.

“What can I say? Times have changed,” he said in a brief phone interview. “Anyway, that’s it.”

‘When is this going to be over? What do I have to do?’

While Goetz’s name resurfaced following Neely’s death, another case draws parallels to other aspects of the fatal subway encounter.

In January 1990, Rodney Sumter was at the Columbus Circle station with his 3-year-old son when a homeless man allegedly spit on him and punched him in the face. Sumter, a 39-year-old Black Upper Manhattan resident, tried to run away, the Times reported. When that didn’t work, his attorney said, Sumter “slammed the man’s head into the subway platform,” and kicked him, killing him.

“Unfortunately, the subway is not the safest place in the world,” Sumter’s attorney, Lewis Tyson, told the paper. “Unfortunately, someone died because of it.”

Unlike Goetz, Sumter was charged but never indicted. And unlike Neely, the homeless man he killed was never identified. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Queens on Valentine’s Day, the AP reported at the time.

In the 1990 New York Magazine story, Sumter described his fear as he “tussled” with the man just feet from his son.

“He was still growling,” Sumter said. “I’m thinking, When is this going to be over? What do I have to do?”

Sumter did not respond to Gothamist’s requests for comment.

The magazine reported that the case had sparked a debate about self-defense — whether Sumter had acted appropriately to protect himself and his son, or if he’d gone too far. But the story said that many members of the public supported him, because his case “embodied some of New Yorkers’ deepest fears — the straphanger’s terror of deranged homeless people, the father’s concern for his child, the almost universal feeling that the bad guys are in control and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

The divide closely resembles the conversation playing out now in the wake of Neely’s choking even though the crime rate in the transit system is far lower now than it was 33 years ago. There were more than 18,000 reported felonies in the subway system that year, according to Umbach, the historian, compared to just over 2,300 last year.

Ron Kuby, who represented the teen Goetz paralyzed, said fears about crime on the subway have blurred the line between real and perceived threats.

“The fear is sort of deliberately overblown and encouraged, and then people act on their fears rather than on facts,” he said.

The initial reaction to Neely’s death suggests that some things have changed since the 1980s and 1990s, beyond crime stats. Conversations around mental health, homelessness and race have all shifted in recent years. Even Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and one of the city’s most famous citizen anti-crime foes, reacted to Neely’s death by calling for more resources for the homeless.

“They need our help desperately, and we allow them to roam about the city without help,” he told Gothamist. “Shame on us as a society.”

Neely’s death prompts calls for change

Last Wednesday, a couple days after Neely’s death, dozens of people packed onto the uptown platform at the Broadway-Lafayette station, where first responders found Neely’s body.

“We keep us safe,” the crowd chanted over and over, as a group of police officers watched in silence.

Justin Pines, a Black and formerly homeless man, came to the vigil because he said it was “disturbing” to see how Neely’s fellow subway passengers had acted.

“That Black person was simply f***** screaming they were f***** hungry, and no one did anything except choke him to death and watch someone choke him to death,” he said. “That’s why I’m f***** here.”

But Pines said rallying and screaming someone’s name won’t prevent another person from becoming the next Jordan Neely.

“It’s not enough,” he said. “None of this is enough. And we owe each other a lot more.”