Six minutes in a chokehold: New book examines the Jordan Neely death

A new book looks back at the May 1, 2023, death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway car. Neely, an unhoused Black man known for his Michael Jackson impersonations, was found dead after Daniel Penny, a white former Marine, held him in a chokehold for six minutes. The incident captured national attention because it occurred in a space where professional help was absent.

The timeline leading to that fatal encounter reveals a series of gaps in support systems. For over a decade, Neely had interactions with police, starting with minor offenses like sleeping rough and jumping turnstiles. In more recent years, these interactions included violent assaults, including punching a woman in the face, which led to his time at Rikers Island.

Instead of prison, Neely was placed in an alternative to incarceration program in the Bronx. This type of facility aims to offer restorative care for individuals with substance issues. Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed to this arrangement. However, Neely eventually walked out of the facility. In April 2023, weeks before his death, he was acting erratically at the Coney Island subway terminal. Outreach workers tried to help, but they did not recognize him as a man with an active warrant. He ran off into the night and was later found dead on the floor of a different subway car.

Anand Giridharadas, the journalist who wrote Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, spent more than two years investigating the events. He sought to understand the context that the viral video did not show. Giridharadas argues that both men felt abandoned by the systems designed to protect them. He notes that Neely felt left behind for a long time, while Penny felt that law enforcement had not been present to handle the crisis.

The legal process concluded in December 2024 with a verdict that divided opinion. A jury acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide after hanging on a second-degree manslaughter charge, leading the prosecution to dismiss that count. The days following the verdict saw Penny enter the political spotlight. Vice President-elect JD Vance invited him to the Army-Navy game alongside President-elect Trump.

Shortly after that appearance, Penny received a job offer from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He was made a partner on the firm's American dynamism team, which invests in startups focused on weapons systems and drones. This move surprised many observers, given that Penny had not graduated from college. He had embraced the money and the symbolic status that came with the case.

Giridharadas explores the parallel between this case and the 2024 shooting of UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. In both instances, the public debated whether the actors were filling a void left by unresponsive systems. On the right, Penny was seen as stepping in where police failed. On the left, Mangione was viewed as reacting to a cruel healthcare system. Activist Hawk Newsome argued that if society accepts vigilantes, Black communities need their own, while also building their own schools and media.

The book posits that this sense of abandonment leads decent people to take matters into their own hands. Giridharadas suggests that the pervasiveness of this feeling allows for such outcomes. The investigation highlights the specific conditions of Neely's life in the Bronx and Penny's origins in West Islip, Long Island. These locations represent different relationships with the city and the systems that failed to intervene in time.