White Marine Murders Black Homeless Man on NY Subway. NY Police, Mayor Refuse to Act.
Jordan Neely was held down by two other white males as an as-yet unidentified former Marine strangled him to death in a choke hold.
A thirty-year-old Black man was murdered on a New York subway train as other passengers looked on and did nothing to assist him.
Jordan Neely was a homeless man who suffered from mental illness. He coped with his troubles by dancing in public as a Michael Jackson impersonator. This week, while pleading with passengers on a busy subway train, Mr. Neely was put in a choke hold by a twenty-four-year-old white male identified only as a former U.S. Marine, while two other white males held him down so he could not escape or fight back. After he lost consciousness, Mr. Neely was taken to Lenox Hospital, located in Greenwich Village, where he was pronounced dead.
According to video and eyewitness accounts Neely boarded a northbound F train on Monday afternoon a little after 2 p.m. and began berating straphangers. “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die,” he screamed, according to Juan Alberto Vazquez’s account given to the New York Times. Neely did not assault anyone, Vazquez said.
Police, unsurprisingly, have declined to charge the assailants, instead releasing them to kill again. Also not at all surprisingly, media outlets so far have portrayed Mr. Neely falsely as violent and instigating the whole thing, prompting his murderers to step in and subdue him with lethal force. At no point do most the stories ever acknowledge that he had not actually been violent or that there were alternatives to dealing with the situation short of killing him.
Mr. Neely’s murderer is known to the police and to media outlets, which refuse to publish his identity in order to protect him from accountability. That his age and veteran status have been reported means that his name is known, but not being shared beyond the absolute bare minimum deemed necessary.
Instead of calling the murder what it is, namely, a public lynching, the media is portraying Mr. Neely as a violent crazy homeless man who posed a threat to the safety of paying passengers, never mind that he was himself a paying passenger and had every right to be on the train. Jordan Neely cried out for help, and received only death.
Mr. Neely had been suffering mental illness since childhood, when his mother was brutally murdered by her boyfriend and stuffed into a suitcase, according to those gathering information about him. Society not only refused to help him in any way, it made it impossible for him to live or get treatment for his trauma-inflicted illness. Instead, it continually jailed him and forced him to live on the streets, after denying him the care he needed. And now it has murdered him by public lynching, with New York Mayor and former police chief Eric Adams gleefully protecting his killers while cracking down violently on the poor and homeless.
At what point do New Yorkers fill the streets in protest of all this? It’s more important to city “leaders” to stop homeless people from breathing than it is to stop a viral plague that continues to decimate working folk and there is nothing to be gained by remaining on the sidelines keeping quiet and hoping you’re not next, because eventually you shall be—and far sooner than you think.