Witnesses in NYC subway chokehold case say Jordan Neely’s outburst 'terrified' them

Alethea Gittings has been yelled at, stood over and sexually accosted on the New York City subway. Those incidents have made her angry, she said in a Manhattan courtroom on Friday.

But when Jordan Neely boarded her uptown F train and started screaming on May 1, 2023, Gittings wasn’t angry. She was scared.

“When he came in, he was unbelievably off the charts,” Gittings told police at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station that day, according to body-camera footage played in court. “He scared the living daylights out of everybody.”

Gittings was one of several New Yorkers who were on the subway with Neely who took the witness stand this week at the criminal trial of Daniel Penny, a former Marine who is charged with killing Neely. As Neely shouted at passengers, Penny wrapped his arm around Neely, pulled him to the floor of the train car and kept him in a chokehold for about six minutes.

Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator who was homeless at the time, was pronounced dead soon afterward. Penny has pleaded not guilty to manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges.

A cellphone video that recorded several minutes of the havoc on the F train went viral and latched onto politically charged debates about subway safety, homelessness and mental illness. Some questioned whether race could have played a role in Penny’s actions, because he is white and Neely was Black. Supporters called Penny a hero and donated more than $3 million to a legal defense fund. Advocates for homeless New Yorkers flooded the Broadway-Lafayette Street station to protest Neely's death and press prosecutors to bring criminal charges against Penny.

Like Gittings, several passengers told jurors they had witnessed other outbursts on the train before. But as they described their May 2023 subway ride with Neely and Penny, one witness after the next said this eruption was different.

“This was just another kind of scale. The desperation in his voice, the anger, the aggressiveness,” Dan Couvreur said as he described Neely’s demeanor on the train.

“I was pretty terrified,” he added. “My heart was beating.”

Lori Sitro, a native New Yorker who’s ridden the subway for 30 years, said she was on her way uptown with her then-5-year-old when Neely boarded their train and started “shouting in people’s faces” that he didn’t have water, didn’t have food, didn’t have a home and wanted to hurt people and go to the Rikers Island jail. She described Neely as “belligerent.”

“It was very erratic and unpredictable,” she said.

Sitro told jurors she pushed a stroller in front of her son to shield him.

“It’s not like you can take a 5-year-old and run to the next train. Five-year-olds don’t move very quickly,” she said. “I felt very relieved when Daniel Penny had stopped him from moving around.”

Penny’s attorney, Thomas Kenniff, latched onto this moment in his opening statement last week, telling jurors Penny put Neely in a chokehold after he saw Neely moving toward the mother and child and saying, “I will kill.”

But on the witness stand on Friday, Sitro didn’t remember it happening that way.

“Did Mr. Neely ever lunge at you and say, ‘I will kill?’” Assistant District Attorney Jillian Shartrand asked.

“No, he did not,” Sitro replied. She said although she felt unsafe, she never heard Neely say those words and he did not lunge directly at her.

Penny and his attorneys have said the former Marine put Neely in a chokehold not to kill him but to restrain him, because he and other subway riders were afraid. Some witnesses who took the stand said they felt nervous, scared or even terrified.

Juan Alberto Vazquez, an independent journalist who recorded the viral video, told jurors he was thinking about a 2022 mass shooting on the N train he had reported on. He and several other passengers said they feared Neely might be armed.

That turned out not to be true. But Vazquez said he yelled for someone to call the police because a passenger had been shouting violently and one man started to grab onto another.

“This was not a normal scene,” Vazquez said through a Spanish interpreter.

Other witnesses said it was Penny who had behaved inappropriately.

Larry Goodson said Penny “pounced” on Neely “so quick and so fast,” when Neely wasn’t in a threatening position “at all.” He said that when the train pulled into the station, he tried to convince Penny to let Neely out of the chokehold. He was on the phone with his fiancée, who served in the military, and worried Neely might be dying.

“Mr. Penny did not respond,” Goodson said.

This story has been updated with additional information.