At the opening of the video, the audio is strangely muffled. Juan Alberto Vázquez, the freelance journalist who captured the footage, begins recording from outside the train car where Daniel Penny has a 30-year-old homeless man named Jordan Neely choking him. A couple of other passengers help hold Neely down, making sure he can’t get free. Neely opens her mouth, but all we can hear is people chatting over the electrical hum of machinery, the sounds of shoes squeaking on the station floors, the screeching of other trains coming and going—all white noise. enveloping and familiar of a New York subway station. Despite the violent death we know is coming, the sounds are deafeningly normal. A voice rises above the hum, calling the police through a speaker, but there’s no particular urgency to that call.
Penny actually looks like she might be chewing gum. Neely struggles, plopping down on the floor of the car, panicking and huffing before her eyes darken and begin to close. TO my Note, Penny himself seems to panic, momentarily, when he notices someone recording. After that, however, her face only registers effort through a few slight grimaces. It’s like this is the most routine of interactions: applying potentially lethal force to another human being.
That lack of urgency pervades the scene. Instead of alarm, I only perceive a professional detachment, a detachment reflected in the window pane that initially separates Vázquez from the action. The men helping Penny move as if they were trying to calm down an upset child. Near the end of the video, another passenger warns Penny, an ex-Marine who has never seen combat but has apparently learned the “blood choke” she uses here, that Neely has defecated on himself, a sign that may be dead or dying. “You don’t have to catch a murder charge,” she says. (The Manhattan district attorney’s office stated that planned to charge Penny with second degree manslaughter; His lawyers initially issued a statement saying that he “never intended to harm Mr. Neely and could not have foreseen his untimely death”).
All the agitation and alarm and fear of violence in this situation seems to have occurred prior to the application of a chokehold.
Much of the writing about Neely’s death has been about the mundane nature of her presence on that F train, her status as one of many mentally ill and homeless people whose erratic behavior could frighten others. Some of the people who didn’t see the need for Penny’s physical intervention seemed to see no need for any intervention; any self-respecting New Yorker, they said, would know how to ignore Neely and move on to another car. But this also seems wrong to me, the rhetorical equivalent of Penny’s firm grip. It is a testament to how accustomed we have become to the sight of public suffering. We turn around or walk over people who appear as obstacles to the proper development of our days. We prefer that their misery does not affect our own life. But the indifference and fear that maintain this border can be as deadly as a stranglehold. That’s what scares me about this footage: without anyone appearing to be acting with the intent to kill, a man ends up dead.
The calm quality of the footage tells us everything we need to know about death and suffering in this society. When that passenger notices that Neely has pooped, one of the men who’ve helped restrain him replies, impassively, that what appears to be new poop is actually old poop. He says this in a way that, I suppose, makes him and everyone else in the scene feel better.
Neely, whose mother she was murdered by her boyfriend in 2007, she was a familiar figure to community workers in Manhattan. His mother’s death changed his life.. He dropped out of Washington Irving High School, where he was known as a good student with a penchant for impersonating Michael Jackson. He would perform for subway riders in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. He slowly descended into drug addiction and mental illness. He was in and out of treatment and was frequently arrested for offenses including fee evasion and hitting people. Extension workers eventually came to fear that he might seriously harm himself or others. In 2021, he was arrested for beating an elderly woman, which precipitated his enrollment in a treatment center this year. But he stopped treatment and, in the spring, he seemed to be getting worse and worse.
Despite the violent death we know is coming, the sounds are deafeningly normal.
As the veteran New York journalist Errol Louis recently wrote, Neely was, when he boarded that train, already effectively dead. He belonged to an underclass whose problems we must banish from our consciousness if we are to enjoy our own lives, relegating them to shelters or treatment centers that we hope never to find. According to reports, what Neely did that he so alarmed the passengers was yelled aggressively about how hungry and needy he was, and that he no longer cared if he was jailed or killed. Perhaps the cyclists perceived in Neely’s language the logical end point of his desperation, the will to cross the border that separates him from others. Even if Penny hadn’t been filmed choking Neely, even if Neely had gotten off the train alive, the fact that her scream was immediately received as a sinister threat, or, at best, a warning to flee, it reflects how cautious and afraid we are of each other. All the agitation and alarm and fear of violence in this situation seems to have passed. before applying a chokehold. It’s only when someone is slowly being killed that a strange calm is restored.
When I first saw the video, I didn’t think of it in relation to those many familiar videos of murders by police officers. I thought about it in relation to the footage of the drone strike. In those videos, we see murders great in their effect, presentation, and execution, even though, in reality, we’re seeing the kinds of violence reserved for those who don’t enjoy the protections we afford American citizens. I see some of the abstraction of those videos in the faces in this video, in the way people don’t seem to register the specter of death. Nobody wants nobody to die; it’s just the cost of doing business.
Source photos: Keith Getter/Moment/Getty Images; Corbis/Getty Images.
Ismail Muhammad is the magazine’s story editor. he has written about waves of migration to New York, diversity in publishing and filmmaker garrett bradley.
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