Part 2. America - Through The Eyes Of Jordan Neely's Death

What we can learn

Part 2

I was struck by many aspects of all this – things that, when peeled back, reveal how deeply and insidiously race seeps into every nook and cranny of our country. Penny, right or wrong, acted as a vigilante. As a vigilante, he killed a Black American, was praised, rewarded, and walked away. All of us know that all of this would have had a different outcome if the race roles had been reversed.

My thoughts turned to Kyle Rittenhouse, another White vigilante who killed two men who were protesting the police shooting of a Black man. I’m taking no position at all on whether or not that shooting was justified. Just on how it all played out and America’s response.

On August 25, 2020 Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Antioch IL, shot and killed two men and wounded another man in Kenosha WS. The shootings occurred during the protest and unrest that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake. Race was a major theme in media commentary, although Rittenhouse and those he shot were white. Rittenhouse was armed with an AR-15 style rifle and had joined a group of armed White people in Kenosha who said that they had traveled to Kenosha to protect businesses.

Joseph D. Rosenbaum, a 36-year-old unarmed Kenosha man, ran at Rittenhouse and grabbed the barrel of his rifle after throwing a plastic shopping bag of clothing at him. Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum four times at close range, killing him. Rittenhouse fled and was pursued by the crowd. Anthony Huber, a 26-year-old-resident of the area, struck Rittenhouse in the head with a skateboard and attempted to wrestle his rifle away; Rittenhouse shot him once, fatally.

Gaige Paul Grosskreutz, a 26-year-old also from the area, who pointed a handgun at Rittenhouse, was shot by Rittenhouse in the arm and survived.

Prosecutors charged Rittenhouse with two counts of homicide, one count of attempted homicide, two counts of reckless endangerment, one count of unlawful possession of a firearm, and one count of curfew violation. His defense lawyers argued that Rittenhouse had stood his ground and had acted in self-defense asserting that his attackers were part of a mob that "attacked him in the street like an animal" and that he used force necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself. Judge Bruce Schroeder dismissed the unlawful possession charge and the curfew violation charge for being legally unsupported, and a jury found Rittenhouse not guilty of the remaining charges.

Once again, Republican members of Congress were elated after a jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges. "I will arm wrestle @mattgaetz to get dibs for Kyle as an intern," Rep. Paul Gosar wrote on Twitter.

"May Kyle and his family now live in peace," wrote Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. "Kyle is one of [the] good ones."

Matt Gaetz said that he was interested in hiring Rittenhouse as an intern. "He deserves a 'not guilty' verdict, and I sure hope he gets it, because you know what, Kyle Rittenhouse would probably make a pretty good congressional intern. We may reach out to him and see if he'd be interested in helping the country in additional ways."

Rep. Madison Cawthorn posted a video on Instagram that included text that blared, "KYLE: IF YOU WANT AN INTERNSHIP, REACH OUT TO ME."

Rep. Lee Zeldin, who was in the running for governor of New York, seemingly celebrated the verdict as a victory for the right to self-defense.

A tweet on the House GOP Judiciary account simply said, "Justice."

I continued to dwell on vigilantes and the fates they have met. I thought about the long-ago 1984 subway shooting of four Black teenagers by White passenger, Bernard Goetz who said he had been a mugging target, and the similarities to the Jordan Neely case. Mr. Goetz instantly became famous.

On December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four youths on a NYC Subway train in after they allegedly tried to rob him. All four victims survived, though one, Darrell Cabey, was paralyzed and suffered brain damage as a result of his injuries. Goetz fled to Vermont before surrendering to police nine days after the shooting. He was charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, and several firearms offenses. A jury subsequently found Goetz guilty of one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm and acquitted him of the remaining charges. For the firearm offense, he served eight months of a one-year sentence.

Like Jordan Neely, the shootings initially drew considerable support from the public. A Daily News-WABC-TV poll released in January 1985 showed 49 percent of the 515 New Yorkers questioned approved of Goetz's actions, while only 31 percent disapproved. A special hotline set up by police to seek information was swamped by calls supporting the shooter and calling him a hero. In March, District Attorney Morgenthau reported that the letters his office received were running 3 to 1 in Goetz's favor. The same month, a Gallup poll interviewing 1,009 adults found that 57% of respondents approved of Goetz's shootings and two-thirds said that Goetz had acted in self-defense.

But, compared to the January poll, Goetz's support among Black Americans had dipped considerably: While only 36% of Black respondents disapproved of his actions in the January poll, 53% reported disapproval in the March poll. Questions of what impact race had on Goetz's thinking, the public's reaction, and the verdict by the predominately White jury became hotly debated.

Supporters viewed Goetz as a hero for standing up to his attackers – who claimed they were merely panhandling, not robbing. The Guardian Angels, a volunteer patrol group of mostly Black and Hispanic teenagers, collected thousands of dollars from subway riders toward a legal defense fund for Goetz. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a right-leaning civil rights organization, supported Goetz. CORE's director, Roy Innis who would later be elected to the executive board of the NRA, offered to raise defense money, saying that Goetz was "the avenger for all of us".

A legal group founded by the NRA—the Firearms Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund—donated $20,000 ($60,730 in today’s dollars) to Goetz's defense. Black Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter bemoaned the public's initial reaction to the shooting, arguing, "The tragedy of the Goetz case is that a public barely aware of the facts was rooting for him to get away with it. The tragedy is that a public eager to identify transgressors in advance decided from the start that Mr. Goetz was a hero and that his Black victims deserved what they got."

My mind continued to wander across all the many aspects of America that the Neely death touched on. I thought about all the Black Americans that have managed to magically take their own lives before their antagonist could do them in.

In 2014 several NYPD officers tried to arrest Eric Garner for selling tax-free, individual cigarettes. It was how he fed his family. When Eric protested, the police used a previously banned choke hold. Eric died and the coroner ruled it a homicide by choking. But the police union and attorneys for the cop who had choked Eric claimed that Eric had killed himself by having arthritis and being overweight at the exact same time as officer Daniel Pantaleo’s arm was around his neck.

In Jordan Neely’s case, again, the coroner ruled his death as caused from asphyxiation brought on by being choked. But according to Penny’s attorney’s, Neely died not of a chokehold, but because of a combination of the struggle, drug use and sickle cell anemia – a medical condition mostly restricted to Black Americans involving blocked blood vessels. What Jordan evidently did not die from was from being choked by Daniel Penny as determined by the medical coroner.

We all watched George Floyd die. The coroner ruled what we all knew - that George had died by suffocation. Yet according to Derek Chauvin’s attorney, Floyd killed himself while under Chauvin’s knee by succumbing to fentanyl. Or maybe a heart condition. It’s not clear. But whatever it was, it was certainly not Derek Chauvin’s knee.

In Aurora Colorado, 23 year old Elijah McClain was walking home through his own neighborhood. Elijah was Black, so he was reported as being suspicious. He was opposed to being stopped and questioned in a harsh and accusatory manner by Aurora police. So the police called in paramedics and held Elijah down while he was illegally injected with 500mg of ketamine. Elijah died. The cause of death was ruled a heart attack brought on by the ketamine. What did the three police officers claim caused Elijah’s death? A sort of standard police defense, Excited Delirium… a situation where a person becomes so agitated that they just die. Nobody’s fault really. Except maybe the dead person’s. As it turns out, ‘excited delirium’ isn’t even a thing. Colorado has since legally disallowed it as being listed as a cause of death as it had been on many police reports of individuals who had died while in police custody. I wrote about excited delirium here last year.

I thought about some of the others who had either managed to kill or injure themselves or who had been killed by aliens while in custody: Emmett Till, Rodney King, Freddie Grey, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Sonya Massey and the hundreds who I grieve for but whose names are too numerous to recall.

I thought especially about the choke hold that Penny had used and what Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote about it 41 years ago in 1983: “Although the city (of Los Angeles) instructs its officers that use of a chokehold does not constitute deadly force, no less than 16 persons have died since 1975 following the use of a chokehold by an LAPD police officer. Twelve have been Negro males…It is undisputed that chokeholds pose a high and unpredictable risk of serious injury or death. Chokeholds are intended to bring a subject under control by causing pain and rendering him unconscious. Depending on the position of the officer's arm and the force applied, the victim's voluntary or involuntary reaction, and his state of health, an officer may inadvertently crush the victim's larynx, trachea, or hyoid. The result may be death caused by either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation. An LAPD officer described the reaction of a person to being choked as "do[ing] the chicken," in reference apparently to the reactions of a chicken when its neck is wrung. The victim experiences extreme pain. His face turns blue as he is deprived of oxygen, he goes into spasmodic convulsions, his eyes roll back, his body wriggles, his feet kick up and down, and his arms move about wildly.”

I thought about what Daryl Gates, the LAPD’s Chief of Police at the time, had said about the use of the chokehold: “We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied the veins and arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people.” The people who the chief referred to as normal people were probably White. In just one word he said it all. And as I re-read Chief Gate’s written statement, I’m reminded that Black Americans are the only ethnic group that has ever had to fight to upper case the name of their group. First it was ‘N’ for Negro and then ‘B’ for Black. It took George Floyd being tortured to death on live TV for the Associated Press, the unofficial governing body for writers, to finally relent and give permission to show respect.

I thought about the false statistics that Daniel Henninger fabricated for his piece in the Wall Street Journal in order to support Penny and denigrate Jordan. “For about 20 years, from the mid-1990s, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, New York City was almost totally safe. You could walk anywhere or ride the subway any time without fear.

If this trial had occurred soon after the 2020 George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, Mr. Penny almost certainly would be in prison. Instead, a Manhattan jury reached no verdict on manslaughter and acquitted him of a lesser charge.

My reading (Daniel Henninger’s): New York City’s residents are basically OK with this result, since the alternative would have been to confirm Mr. Bragg’s determination to imprison Mr. Penny for preventing yet another act of random, often fatal, violence. (To be clear, Mr. Bragg did not want to imprison Mr. Penny for preventing yet another act of random, often fatal, violence. He wanted to imprison him for unnecessarily killing Jordan Neely ) A question for the future is whether these same voters, especially in blue jurisdictions, will revive policies that do work. My nominee: Bring back broken-windows theory.”

Those twenty, totally crime free, wonderful years where New Yorkers sat around safely singing Kumbaya under GOP leadership that Henninger wrote about? According to the NYPD’s own published stats, annual murder and assault rates were 511 per year between 1995 and 2005 then dropped to 378 per year between 2006 and 2023.

Since Henninger brought up the vaunted Broken Windows Policy, I thought about Broken Windows, what I knew about it, and how it played into what Black Americans live through every day as it relates to law enforcement and vigilantism and life on the wrong side of the tracks. Jordan’s world began and ended on the wrong side of the tracks.

Here’s what the New York Legal Aid Society reported about Broken Windows in 2022:

On March 23, 2022, NYPD Commissioner Keechant Keechant Sewell announced that the NYPD would be launching a “quality of life enforcement initiative,” in which officers are directed to focus on low-level offenses that the NYPD calls “precursors to violence,” such as open container, marijuana sales, public urination, driving without a license, and dice games. The NYPD’s announcement signals that the Department is doubling down on the theoryof broken windows policing, the strategy of focusing on low-level disorder in the hopes ofreducing more serious crime. Decades of research have shown that this style of policing produces little to no public safety benefit while further alienating intensively policed communities, criminalizing poverty, and exacerbating racial disparities.

Conclusion: “The stark racial disparities in broken windows arrests in New York City in 2021 raise important questions concerning the NYPD’s ability to carry out a Quality of Life Enforcement Initiative in a fair and impartial manner. The intensity of policing in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, as called for in the NYPD’snew initiative, is likely to produce similarly disparate results in the months to come.

The NYPD’s move to double down on broken windows policing at this time is a grave mistake. Decades of research make it clear that broken windows policing does not decrease serious crime and that it can inflict serious harm on the communities most intensively policed. The most recent data on broken windows arrestswarns us that Black and Latinx New Yorkers will, once again, bear the burdens of the aggressive low-level policing initiative and the collateral consequences that come with disproportionate arrest numbers and criminal legal system involvement.”

Was Penny sort of standing his ground? I thought about ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws – the law that allowed George Zimmerman to grab his pistol, follow unarmed Trayvon Martin as he walked within his own neighborhood, confront him, engage with him, shoot and kill him, walk away scott free and later sell the murder weapon as a kind of trophy for $250,000. Mr. Zimmerman said some of the proceeds would serve to "fight Black Lives Matter violence against law enforcement officers"

I’ve read dozens of stories about Jordan’s death. I’ve read the most conservative sources for whom Penny was a hero and I’ve read the stories that proclaim he’s a racist. But every story – every single one - uses language that gives Penny a stature that Jordan never could have achieved: White former Marine, architecture student, son of a wealthy prominent family, all-American looks. (I’m an American and I look nothing at all like Daniel Penny.) And now Arizona Republican Congressman Eli Crane wants to award Penny the Congressional Gold Medal, congress’ highest civilian award. A prestigious award for killing Jordan that Penny can proudly hang on his wall. Jordan Neely? Black, homeless, drug addict, mentally ill, long rap sheet, street performer…

Finally, I read what esteemed NY Times Black columnist John McWhorter had to say about all this – edited for brevity without changing McWhorter’s points or opinions.

“Since Monday, when a jury found Daniel Penny not guilty in the death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway, the conversation has threatened to go off the rails…It should have been a story about the horror of a mentally ill person abandoned by the city and left to fend for himself in subway tunnels or on street corners, or about how scary it can be for those around him to navigate the wreckage, or about how one 24-year-old Marine veteran tried to protect a group of strangers, taking action that ended in unintended tragedy.

But Penny is white and Neely, 30, was Black. So instead it became a story of race — and all the more so after the jury’s verdict — a variation of Daniel Pantaleo going free after choking Eric Garner in 2014. But that’s not what happened here, and I wish those describing Penny or his acquittal as racist might consider things from another vantage point.

The claim that Penny acted out of racism implies that if he had seen a white man scaring subway passengers in that way, he either would not have restrained the man at all or would have done so for a shorter time.

I am unaware of how we could know such a thing. Some will think of the white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd as he begged for his life. The common assumption was that Floyd’s race informed Chauvin’s behavior. How then should we think of the case of Tony Timpa, a white man who died four years earlier under very similar circumstances in Dallas?

To claim Penny was acquitted because he is white implies also that if he were Black, he would have been convicted and imprisoned. I am unaware of how we could know this, either. Any lawyer defending a Black Marine veteran in this instance would be sure to invoke his service to his country and to his fellow passengers, and to warn jurors against making him another statistic in the annals of judicial bias. Given the circumstances and the setting, it seems likely to me that they would take that responsibility seriously.

This is one of those subjects that leads readers to tell me they like my newsletters “but….” When I raise these ideas, in conversation or print, I am often told that I’m missing the centrality of racism in the American experience, or that Penny’s racism is too obvious to require discussion or proof. I wish those who believe that would consider that reality is more complex than just “America hates Black people.”

McWhorter, a Columbia University linguist and a regular columnist for a paper that has been awarded a Nobel Prize and 137 Pulitzers, misses so much here. It's odd to the point of absurdity for McWhorter to imply that race played no role in Derek Chauvin’s casual and public murder of George Floyd. Few (but some) law enforcement officers head out on their shift planning to make life miserable for Black people. But like all of us who live in America, we’ve been conditioned to see Black people differently. Scary… criminal…not quite the same as deserving White people. It’s called unconscious bias, John. Being unaware is why it’s labeled ‘unconscious’.

And as far as McWhorter’s “I am unaware of how we could know?” You could know, John, by simply by being aware, as opposed to ‘unaware’. All you have to do is look around you.

For white people, Jordan’s death was just a one-off event. An event of no importance soon to be forgotten. But for Black Americans it was one more link in a very, very long chain of events. At any rate, if we had not just gone through all of this…if all I had written was, “There was an altercation on the NYC subway that involved two men. One, wealthy, came away unscathed and lauded as a hero.

The other, poor, came away dead.”

You’d have known with absolute certainty who was White and who was Black, am I right? And if I’d titled this Newsletter with Jordan Neely’s name instead of Daniel Penny’s, I speculate that most readers would have recognized the name as familiar, but not actually know who Jordan was. Welcome to the America of Daniel Penny and the other America. The one that Jordan Neely lived in.

My bet would be that if any of us had met Jordan at almost any time during his life, even before his Mom was herself choked to death when Jordan was 14 – much as Jordan would be 16 years later – and then stuffed inside of a suitcase and discarded like a piece of trash, we’d have been able to predict that he had a short shelf life. Daniel Penny is not a violent racist who wants to see Black people killed. He’s just a White person who lives in America. Maybe racism wasn’t the only thing that killed Jordan, but it was there playing a prominent role. But for sure, America’s Thing With Race was the only thing that made a VIP box sitting, gold medal winning, presidential hob-knobbing, 3.5 million dollar hero out of Daniel Penny.

If I could be granted one wish around all of this, my wish would be that America knew all this without me having to write about it.

Wayne Hare lives in western Colorado and writes from wherever he has wandered. He’s a decorated former combat Marine and helicopter gunner in Vietnam. He was awarded five medals as opposed to Penny’s 7 non-combat medals!. Wayne often hopes that he never killed anybody. But he does wonder when JD is going to invite him to share a VIP booth with him and Trump at a football game.

Special thanks to Lorey Zahn for copy-editing this long piece. She found dozens of typos and errors.