Criminals who endanger our safety should know they are taking their own lives in their hands.
. . . "On May 1, riding a different F train near the Broadway-Lafayette stop in Manhattan, was 30-year-old Jordan Neely, a homeless black man with a history of mental illness who had been arrested 42 times, including for punching a 65-year-old woman in June 2021 and a 67-year-old woman in November of the same year. I should note here that someone who has been arrested 42 times has proven beyond any doubt that he cannot be trusted in society and should be confined either to a prison or a mental hospital for his own safety and ours. But he was out and about and, on May 1, he was aboard that F train threatening riders, up to no good yet again. Witnesses report that he was yelling, tossed down his jacket, was throwing around garbage and shouted that he was “fed up,” that he “didn’t care” if he went to “prison for life” and that he was “ready to die.”
"That kind of behavior would make almost anyone on that subway car apprehensive. Fortunately, unlike the incident I had witnessed a few weeks earlier, in which we had to sit silently and hope that the threatened violence would not materialize, in the case of Jordan Neely, a 24-year-old Marine named Daniel Penny happened to be on the train and, with the assistance of other riders, managed to subdue Neely and put him in a chokehold. Unfortunately, the Marine squeezed too hard or held on too long, and Neely passed out and later died.
"Neely did not deserve to die, of course. But neither did his death represent some wholly unexpected and shocking turn of events. When you get on the subway and start threatening riders and act like a dangerous lunatic—and, given Neely’s criminal record, engage in such risky behavior repeatedly—the possibility that sooner or later, something bad could happen to you or others around you is necessarily higher than it would be during afternoon tea.". . .
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