Executing Jordan Neely makes the vigilante into the villain
While AI threatens jobs, where's our humanity?
Usually, this is an investigative newsletter about video games and technology. But today, I want to take a short break to talk about Jordan Neely. I’m a native New Yorker, born and raised. And what happened on Tuesday, I can’t ignore.1
Trigger warning for an explicit description of violence down below.
Neely was a 30-year-old homeless Black man who boarded a northbound F train on Tuesday, yelled he was hungry and thirsty and ready to die, and then got killed by a 24-year-old ex-Marine. Those are the facts. There is video evidence, and some might wonder, if we didn’t have photos and video, perhaps this entire incident would have flown under the radar.
When I first read about this murder in The New York Times, I didn’t think much of it. The story oddly framed Neely’s death as a vigilante act against a man acting erratically in a threatening manner, with onlookers being unsure of whether he was alive or not. One person was even quoted saying that they thought he would be alright. For the record, Neely was put in a chokehold in fifteen minutes, couldn’t speak and could only flail his arms. The photos of him dying are heart-wrenching.
Yet so many people online are responding with complete apathy. Some say that because of Neely’s prior history of 40 arrests, they did not care what happened to him and were unmoved by his death. And now add to that the recent deaths of people who were in the wrong place and wrong time, including, shockingly, a 20-year-old woman making the wrong turn onto a 65-year-old man’s driveway in upstate New York, who got shot through her car and died. She was White and had been looking for a friend’s house. It’s clear that lately, regardless of race, people are out to murder strangers.
In some ways, I’m the perfect person to be writing an essay about this. I started getting harassed on the street in New York City as soon as I turned 14 and discovered Forever 21 short shorts. The harassment comes from everywhere, from homeless and housed people alike. A middle-aged White businessman made a slimy remark at me while we crossed paths in midtown Manhattan. At the time, I stared at him in complete disbelief, unused to being spoken to in a sexual manner because I was a child. It was gross. But I did not consider violence, even though I’ve trained in taekwondo, explicitly for self-defense.
(Photo of the author of this newsletter riding the F train.)
In my nearly 28 years in New York City, I’ve been shouted at, screamed at, verbally disparaged by any number of people on the street. Compared to how Neely behaved on that train, by the description, I’ve sadly bore witness to nearly countless homeless people acting in similar ways around me. Sometimes it’s a racist tirade aimed at me because I don’t have any spare change. (This has also happened to me while I visited San Francisco.) I’ve been cursed at for allegedly causing Covid-19, for ruining lives because I’m Asian, for being a China woman, whatever that means. A few years ago, a man in the Financial District watched me cross the street rapidly to get away from his catcalling, witnessed me nearly get hit by a car, and then had the audacity to shout at me, “See? If you weren’t running away from me, you wouldn’t be getting hit by cars!”2
I have almost a dozen stories like this, and the rest of my many, many experiences are not memorable enough to recount. Why am I going into detail? Because I’ve seen people (who I assume are likely not from New York) online calling stories like this into question and boldly accusing women of making up their claims that they have been harassed. My hope is that I can prove, at least to those willing to listen, that these claims are real.3
One time, I was holding hands with my mom as we walked down the street, and we got harassed by a man who mistook us for a pair of lesbians and started calling us homophobic slurs that my mom had never heard of and did not know. I was mad for her for having to learn. I have hated these harassers, cursed them out once I reached a safe distance, or stared straight past them. Growing up in New York, I have the hard-earned skill of being able to blatantly ignore anyone who comes near me, even if they’re standing right in my space. And once, a homeless man flipped the middle finger at me at a subway station. I waited for the train doors to close before I flipped him right back.
That nobody on the subway car knew and everyone thought Neely was going to be fine. That’s just simply not how 15-minute chokeholds work.
New York City — like Los Angeles and San Francisco — has a significant homelessness problem. Late at night, subway train cars are filled with sleeping people, odors, and yes, people who yell, scream, act erratically in ways that have made me feel scared. When a train pulls into the station, I quickly assess my surroundings, pick the cleanest possible car, which is usually the one with the most people. An empty train car is suspicious and to be avoided. If things feel really dire, as in multiple mentally unwell people yelling or swaying around, I stand near the exit, ready to flee.
I have wondered, in the past few years, as prices skyrocket, as housing grows more unaffordable, as policies to build housing get shut down, what would happen to New York’s homeless. The few cents and dollars they beg for increasingly feel stretched thin. Articles saying you need $100,000 to live comfortably in New York only cement this point. If you need $100,000, how do people making $0 survive?
The answer is that many don’t. And many people don’t care.4
While I usually ignore what goes on on the subway, the humanizing moment for me in hearing Neely’s story came when I saw The New York Post piece, which shows images of what happened. Unlike The Times piece, which just says a man somehow died, the Post story fills in some important context with images: The desperate look in Neely’s eye in his last moments, as he realized he was completely out of air and unable to get out of the chokehold. That his final plea for food and water was met with him being put out of his misery, whether he asked for it or not. The subway dancer and performer might have entered that train car saying he was ready to die, but now he didn’t get any choice in the matter. The ex-Marine did not get arrested after being questioned. A medical examiner has ruled Neely’s death a homicide as he died from a neck compression, but the case still has to be investigated.