On May 1, 2023, an unhoused Black man named Jordan Neely boarded the New York City subway. For years, Neely had drawn crowds with his Michael Jackson impersonation, but on that day he was in crisis, shouting threats and frightening fellow passengers.
A white former Marine named Daniel Penny stepped in, putting Neely into a chokehold for six minutes, killing him. Later, a video of the encounter divided the country. To some, Penny was doing what the police weren't there to do. To others, Neely was a victim, another Black man whose life had been treated as disposable.
Journalist Anand Giridharadas spent more than two years investigating what the video couldn't show. He wanted to write a story "that would take us to the heart of America and what it means to live in this country, in this moment." When tragic stories become social media fodder, Giridharadas says, "human beings become caricatures."
In December 2024, Penny was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide after a jury hung on a second degree manslaughter charge and the prosecution dismissed it. Within days of the verdict, Vice President-elect JD Vance invited Penny to the Army-Navy game alongside President-elect Trump. Soon afterward, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm gave him a job.
In his new book, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, Giridharadas posits that both men felt let down by the systems that should have protected them.
"I think Jordan Neely had felt abandoned for a very long time, and had reason to feel that way," Giridharadas says. "Daniel Penny would claim that he felt abandoned in terms of law enforcement not being there, and in terms of all the systems that had allowed Jordan Neely to be in that subway car in that condition instead of all of the other conditions that he might have been in had there been a better system of care."
Giridharadas says it's that sense of abandonment that leads people to take matters into their own hands, often with tragic results: "I think it behooves us to think about the condition in which we've left people, this sense of abandonment that we've allowed to be so pervasive that decent people feel like maybe there's no other route for folks besides just DIYing it."
Interview highlights
On Jordan Neely's criminal record and the city's attempt at rehabilitation
He had a record of interactions with the police that went back more than a decade. But it was very trivial stuff at the beginning. It was essentially the stuff of what it takes to be homeless in New York, jumping turnstiles, sleeping rough. And then in more recent years, it had gotten more serious and he'd committed a couple of violent crimes, assaults, punching a woman in the face, things like that. And he had gone to Rikers. He'd been charged. And then as part of this alternative to incarceration program — and there are programs like this popping up around the country, where folks get an alternative to going to prison that is considered more restorative, more in line with actually helping people who have substance issues or other issues — he gets to avail of one of these programs. Prosecution, defense, they all agree. And he gets sent to this kind of rehab facility in the Bronx instead of prison. And one day, he just walks out of that facility.
And then, in April 2023, just a few weeks before he died, he is [at] Coney Island, one of the terminal points on the subway system, and he's acting erratically on the platform. Outreach workers try to deal with him to no avail. The cops have some interaction with him, but they don't actually realize that it is the guy who is out with a warrant for his arrest because he walked out of this program. And the outreach workers who were there that night don't quite realize that he's a guy that their agency knows very well, just maybe not those individual workers. And he sort of runs off into the night. And a few weeks later, he's dead on the floor of a different subway car.
On Daniel Penny's origins in West Islip, Long Island
These towns in central Long Island have this very complicated relationship [with New York City]. … On the one hand, it's very out of the city, but it's right there. A lot of people commute in every day for work. Some don't. These are towns that were largely populated by white flight in the last several decades. … In many ways, these are towns that are almost like middle-class refugee camps from the squalor and terror of New York City.
Maybe even understanding immigrant stories is a more helpful framework for understanding these places. … Immigrants have very complicated relationships with the places they leave. We don't think about that with places that are 45 minutes away from a metropolis, but I actually think that is the way to understand the town in which Daniel Penny grew up. … These are communities where there's often a contempt, often barely concealed, for all the people one wanted to get away from, when one left.
On whether Penny showed remorse
I can't know what's in his heart. I didn't sense that kind of sadness or remorse. And not only did I not necessarily pick that up in that brief conversation we had at his victory party a year and a half after the incident, but one of the things that's striking in both the bodycam video on the scene when they first get there, as well as the interrogation ... is that even in those moments, forget remorse, he doesn't even seem to have curiosity about what may have happened to that guy.
On Penny's MAGA popularity
He sort of gave the impression of a kind of blankness, ideologically. And that was one of the things that then became very strange, that all these people really wanted him to be their symbol and projected onto him all these ideas. And then he, of course, willingly embraced it. He embraced the money that came from it. And then, most dramatically still, at the end of the case, not only was he content to appear with JD Vance and Donald Trump at the Army-Navy game, but shortly thereafter, he got a job offer that gobsmacked many people. This is someone who, I think, has not graduated from college. He was offered a job as a partner at the venture capital firm in Silicon Valley called Andreessen Horowitz. ... He was made partner on their American dynamism team, which is a team that invests in startups that do weapons systems and drones and other things supposedly in the national interest.
On the politicization of the case and parallels with Luigi Mangione
I had spent the last year and a half hearing Daniel Penny's people make an argument that was basically like, "The system wasn't there, the system wasn't responsive. Daniel Penny stepped into a void and did what he had to do, took matters into his own hands because of this void." And then in the jury deliberations during that moment was the Mangione assassination of Brian Thompson, of United Health Care. And as that case started to become better known, a similar argument started to develop around Luigi Mangione, this time on the parts of the left instead of parts of right that Luigi Mangione was stepping into this void of a cruel healthcare system and stepping in because so many people were abandoned and he felt abandoned. …
And then Hawk Newsome, Black Lives Matter activist in New York, says, yes ... if they're gonna have vigilantes, we need Black vigilantes. But we also need to make our own schools, we need to have our own media, we have to have our own everything.
And I just thought to myself, gosh, is this the last kind of common thread? The idea that you could hear on the far right, the far left, and elsewhere that we're abandoned, the system's rigged, no one's listening, take matters into your own hands. The sense of, somebody step up. Somebody do something.
Anna Bauman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Copyright 2026 NPR
