The City: Errol Louis

Jordan Neely Was Already Dead - New York reckons with a homeless epidemic and a killing.

- Errol Louis

FOR SOME NEW YORKERS, Jordan Neely was dead even before Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny allegedly choked the life out of him on the floor of a subway train. Modern America, including New York, designates some categories of people as socially dead-part of an underclass that is subject to exclusion, indifference, or even outright hatred and violence. To be Black, destitute, homeless, and mentally ill in our city is to be one of those outsiders, existing in a kind of internal exile from society's circle of care and concern.

"I don't have food, I don't have a drink, I'm fed up," Neely screamed in the final minutes of his life, according to Juan Alberto Vázquez, a freelance journalist on the train who recorded the incident.

"I don't mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I'm ready to die." It seemed to be a complaint shouted to the heavens, aimed at nobody in particular. Neely "didn't seem like he wanted to hurt anyone," Vázquez later said. But the doomed man's words were sadly accurate about the choices he believed New York offered: prison or death.

As the local tragedy quickly became national and even international news, the city's politicians began squabbling. "Jordan Neely was murdered," Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, calling the killing "disgusting." "We must not become a city where a mentally ill human being can be choked to death by a vigilante without consequence. Or where the killer is justified & cheered," New York City comptroller Brad Lander chimed in.

Mayor Eric Adams, by contrast, complained that Ocasio-Cortez and Lander were jumping to conclusions. "We cannot just blatantly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that, and we should allow the investigation to take its course," he said on CNN.