New York City Mayor Eric Adams appeared to defend the Navy veteran charged in the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man with a long criminal history who shouted death threats on a subway train before being overpowered and strangled.
Daniel Penny, 26, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of manslaughter in May 2023. He is also charged with negligent homicide.
Jurors began deliberations Tuesday after a trial.
Neely, 30, with a lengthy criminal record, a history of mental illness and active arrest warrant at the moment he died, he got on the train, threw his coat on the ground and started making death threats, warning that he was not afraid of dying, going back to prison or a lifetime in prison to spend.
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New York Mayor Eric Adams speaks to reporters after a press conference in New York. Adams defended Navy veteran Daniel Penny, who is accused of killing Jordan Neely on a subway train. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, file)
Penny grabbed him from behind, wrestled him to the ground and held him down with the help of another passenger. He remained at the scene and voluntarily spoke to police. Neely eventually died.
“We’re on the subway right now where we hear someone talking about hurting people, killing people,” Adams said on the Nov. 30 episode of “The Rob Astorino Show.” “You have someone (Penny) on that subway who responded and did what we should have done as a city.”
“Those passengers were scared,” the mayor added.
Penny repeatedly calmed down when Neely, who once performed as a Michael Jackson impersonator, stopped struggling and merely tried to hold him back as he began to escape, Penny’s attorney, Steven Raiser, told jurors during his closing arguments.
Jordan Neely (left) and Moses Harper do their Michael Jackson impersonations in front of the Regal Cinemas in Times Square, showing the Michael Jackson film “This is IT,” Tuesday, October 27, 2009. Neely was murdered on Monday, May 1, 2023 on a New York City subway after allegedly being placed in a chokehold by a fellow passenger. (Andrew Savulich/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
‘The government wasn’t there. The police weren’t there. Danny does,” Raiser said. “And when he needed help, there was no one there. Does the government have the nerve to blame Danny because the police weren’t there? Blame Danny for hanging in there when the police weren’t there?’
Manhattan prosecutor Dafna Yoran responded, saying that Penny “did not recognize that Jordan Neely was a person” and that “he saw him as a person who needed to be eliminated.”
Adams also criticized the city’s mental health system.
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Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely.
“Then you look at the complete failure of our mental health system, a complete failure from the time when psychiatric wards were closed and those who needed help simply took to the streets without providing any safety net to accept them.”
The city medical office ruled Neely’s death a homicide by asphyxiation and blamed the chokehold.
Neely had a history of assaults on subway passengers and other criminal behavior. In 2021, he struck a 67-year-old woman as she left the Bowery station in the East Village in Lower Manhattan.
Between January 2020 and August 2021, he was arrested three times: for public indecency after pulling down his pants and exposing himself to a female stranger, a misdemeanor for punching a woman in the face, and criminal contempt for trespassing of a restraining order. All three cases were dismissed as part of his Feb. 9 plea deal.
While discussing the case, Adams also criticized the use of a photo of Neely used by the media.
Daniel Penny arrives at the Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday, December 3, 2024 in New York, NY. Closing arguments are expected to end today in his second-degree manslaughter and criminal negligence murder trial in the 2023 death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway train. (Rashid Umar Abbasi for Fox News Digital)
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“It looked like it was a young, innocent child being brutally murdered, and it gave that impression. If you look at the photo that was used, it wanted to get into people’s minds that we were dealing with a young, innocent person. kid you know, just a Michael Jackson impersonator who, you know, was brutally attacked.
Fox News Digital’s Michael Ruiz and Rebecca Rosenberg contributed to this report.
