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 in a chokehold. A couple of other passengers help restrain Neely, making sure he cannot wrestle free. Neely opens his mouth, but all we can hear is people chattering over the electric whir of machinery, the sounds of shoes squeaking on the station’s floors, the squeal of other trains arriving and taking their leave — all the engulfing, familiar white noise of a New York subway station. Despite the violent death we know is coming, the sounds are those of a stultifying normalcy. A voice rises above the hum, calling for the police via a loudspeaker, but there is no particular urgency in that call.
Penny actually looks as though he may be chewing gum. Neely struggles, flopping around on the floor of the car, panicking and huffing before his eyes dim and begin to shut. To my eye, Penny himself appears panicked, momentarily, when he notices someone recording. After that, though, his face only registers effort through a few slight grimaces. It’s as if this were the most routine of interactions — applying potentially lethal force to another human being.
That lack of urgency permeates the scene. Instead of alarm, I perceive only businesslike detachment — a detachment mirrored by the windowpane that initially separates Vázquez from the action. The men who help Penny move as if they are trying to pacify an upset child. Near the end of the video, another passenger warns Penny — a former Marine who never saw combat but apparently learned the “blood choke” he uses here — that Neely has defecated on himself, a sign that he may be dead or dying. “You don’t have to catch a murder charge,” he says. (The Manhattan district attorney’s office indicated that it planned to charge Penny with second-degree manslaughter; his attorneys initially released 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 happened before the application of a chokehold.
Much of the writing on Neely’s death has been about the mundane nature of his presence on that F train, his status as one of many mentally ill and homeless people whose erratic behavior might frighten others. Some of the people who saw no need for Penny’s physical intervention seemed to see no need for any intervention; any New Yorker worth his or her salt, they said, would know to ignore Neely, to move along to another car. But this, too, seems wrongheaded to me, the rhetorical equivalent of Penny’s steady grip. It is a testament to how inured we’ve become to the sight of public suffering. We step around or over people who appear as obstacles to the smooth unfolding of our days. We prefer that their misery not impinge on our own lives. But the indifference and fear that maintain this border can be as lethal as a chokehold. That’s what frightens me about this footage: Without anyone seeming to act with the intention to kill, a man winds up dead.
The footage’s sedate quality tells us everything we need to know about death and suffering in this society. When that passenger warns that Neely has defecated, one of the men who has helped restrain him responds, stolidly, that what appears to be new excrement is actually just old excrement. He says this in a way that, I suppose, makes him and everyone else on the scene feel better.
Neely, whose mother was murdered by her boyfriend in 2007, was a familiar figure to outreach workers in Manhattan. His mother’s death upended 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 passengers in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. Gradually he descended into drug addiction and mental illness. He shuttled in and out of treatment and was frequently arrested for infractions including fare evasion and punching people. Outreach workers eventually came to fear that he might seriously harm himself or others. In 2021, he was arrested for punching an elderly woman, precipitating his enrollment in a treatment facility this year. But he abandoned treatment and, in the spring, seemed to become increasingly unwell.
Despite the violent death we know is coming, the sounds are those of a stultifying normalcy.
As the veteran New York journalist Errol Louis wrote recently, Neely was, when he boarded that train, already effectively dead. He belonged to an underclass whose troubles we must exile from our consciousness if we are to enjoy our own lives — relegating them to shelters or treatment facilities that we hope never to encounter ourselves. The thing Neely did that so alarmed passengers was, reportedly, to shout aggressively about how hungry and in need he was, and how he no longer cared whether he was jailed or killed. Maybe riders sensed in Neely’s language his desperation’s logical endpoint, a willingness to cross the border separating him from others. Even if Penny had not been filmed putting Neely in a chokehold, even if Neely had walked off that train alive, the fact that his cry was immediately received as a sinister threat — or, at best, a prompt to flee — reflects how wary and afraid we are of one another. All the agitation and alarm and fear of violence in this situation seems to have happened before the application of a chokehold. It’s only as someone is being slowly killed that a strange calm is restored.
When I first watched the video, I did not think of it in relation to those numerous and familiar videos of killings by police officers. I thought of it in relation to drone-strike footage. In those videos, we see killings that are cool in their affect, presentation and execution — even though, in reality, we are watching the kinds of violence reserved for those who do not enjoy the protections we accord to American citizens. I see something of those videos’ abstraction in the faces in this video, in the way people don’t seem to register death’s specter. Nobody means for anyone to die; it’s just the cost of doing business.
Source photographs: Keith Getter/Moment/Getty Images; Corbis/Getty Images.
Ismail Muhammad is a story editor for the magazine. He has written about waves of migration to New York, diversity in publishing and the filmmaker Garrett Bradley.