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.
By the way, it was a killing. I don’t know how people on the internet attempted to argue that a 15-minute chokehold *accidentally* killed someone. 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. Humans can only last a few minutes without air. I think it’s fair to say that nobody can survive one of those. Neely was executed.
My arsenal of self-defense tools when walking around New York City has always been verbal insults, flipping people off, and making harassers feel invisible. But it has never been, and I can’t believe I even have to say this, murder. For all our societal ills, I would hope that we can agree that killing is wrong.
But what’s unbelievable is that we have not all agreed that killing is wrong. Check the replies to tweets saying that killing is wrong. Some defend the ex-Marine. And check the replies to my tweet that we should all be kinder to each other and that we’re too paranoid. Immediately, I was accused of having an agenda and I was viewed with utmost paranoia myself. One user replied, “Not today, woman!” Even if he meant that as a joke, that is a bizarre way to respond to a simple call for human dignity.
I know the past few years have been hard on everyone. So many parts of our lives feel strained and overwhelming. But surely, even as AI threatens jobs, we haven’t entirely lost our humanity. It’s important that we hold onto it for as long as we can, if we want to salvage any joy left in this world.
For more reading on this, check out Jalopnik reporter and friend of this newsletter Steve DaSilva’s excellent blog here, “Why Are You All So Eager to Kill?”
What can you expect me to cover on this newsletter next? For a change of pace, Zelda. And as always, I still have oodles of reporting notes from the past few weeks/years, which I plan to write up as soon as I can.
You can expect regular coverage to resume soon. This is what journalism is for. I have subject matter expertise here, and I want to share it. I used to cover local New York news and like I mention in this essay, I’ve been harassed a wild number of times. But I value human life too much to consider murdering any of these poor people who have flung any number of insults at me over the decades. And I’d hope people would generally agree, though I know better than to assume they would. To my gaming/tech audience, I apologize for going off topic. But I hope that this essay merely strengthens the rest of the body of work and also contributes to having people in general take gaming journalists more seriously, as I flex our versatility.
Weirdly enough, the incident where I felt absolutely the most unsafe was when I visited SF in 2021, when pandemic restrictions were still somewhat in place. A woman overheard my friend telling me a story, mentioning the word “knife,” and the woman lost her shit. “Knife? You think I have a knife?” She shrieked. My heart dropped. I grabbed all my things and ran as hard as I could. My friend later complained that I had completely ditched her in my desperate run towards safety. I was in a cold sweat and couldn’t calm down for hours afterward.
I haven’t even mentioned that I used to live on 30th Street between 9th and 10th Avenue, a few blocks from a homeless shelter. And I lived there during the scariest months of the pandemic.
I remember that as a child, I was terrified of becoming homeless one day. I saw beggars on the street and I began saving up an emergency fund of $7, so that I could buy McDonald’s for at least seven days straight if that ever became my only possession. My mom was amused by how I landed on $7 and encouraged me to save more.
But as I got older, I grew more callous. Like I mentioned above, street harassment is a daily occurrence for me. Just last week, I took the subway home at 3AM from Manhattan into Queens, and a Black man continuously asked me if I was Korean. That’s it, no rizz, just only, “You Korean? You Korean? You Korean?” ad infinitum until I got off the train. I looked around, didn’t feel safe enough to curse him out, and just let out an audible sigh when I finally reached my stop. By now, I’ve turned the act of ignoring someone into a fine art.
Thanks for writing this.