New Book Revisits Jordan Neely's 2023 Subway Killing

By Elena Vasquez

On May 1, 2023, former Marine Daniel Penny held Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man and longtime Michael Jackson impersonator, in a chokehold for six minutes on a New York City subway car, killing him. Journalist Anand Giridharadas has now spent more than two years investigating what the viral video of the encounter could not show.

His new book, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, argues that both men felt failed by the systems meant to protect them.

What happened after the killing?

In December 2024, a jury acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide after it hung on a second-degree manslaughter charge, which prosecutors dismissed. Within days, Vice President-elect JD Vance invited Penny to attend the Army-Navy game alongside President-elect Trump. Soon after, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz made Penny a partner on its "American dynamism" team, which invests in weapons systems and drone startups.

Giridharadas called that offer one that "gobsmacked many people," noting Penny has not graduated from college.

The video of Neely's death split the country. Some saw Penny doing work the police were not there to do. Others saw another Black man whose life was treated as disposable.

Why did Giridharadas write the book?

He wanted a story "that would take us to the heart of America and what it means to live in this country, in this moment." When tragedies become social media fodder, he says, "human beings become caricatures."

His central thesis: abandonment breeds vigilantism. "I think Jordan Neely had felt abandoned for a very long time, and had reason to feel that way," Giridharadas said. "Daniel Penny would claim that he felt abandoned in terms of law enforcement not being there."

He added: "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."

What did the systems fail to catch?

Neely's record with police stretched back more than a decade. It began, Giridharadas said, with "the stuff of what it takes to be homeless in New York" — jumping turnstiles, sleeping rough. In later years it turned violent, including assaults, and he was sent to Rikers. Prosecutors and defenders agreed to an alternative-to-incarceration program, a restorative model aimed at people with substance issues. He was sent to a Bronx rehab facility instead of prison.

Then he walked out.

In April 2023, weeks before his death, Neely acted erratically on the Coney Island platform. Outreach workers failed to engage him. Police did not realize he was wanted for walking out of the program. He ran off into the night. A few weeks later he was dead on the floor of a different subway car.

Did Penny show remorse?

"I can't know what's in his heart. I didn't sense that kind of sadness or remorse," Giridharadas said. In the bodycam video and the police interrogation, he said, Penny "doesn't even seem to have curiosity about what may have happened to that guy."

On Penny's MAGA embrace, Giridharadas described an ideological "blankness" onto which supporters projected their ideas — and which Penny willingly accepted, along with the money that came with it.

What is the book's larger warning?

Giridharadas draws a parallel to Luigi Mangione, accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson during Penny's jury deliberations. Both camps, left and right, told the same story: the system abandoned us, someone stepped into the void. Black Lives Matter activist Hawk Newsome responded that "if they're gonna have vigilantes, we need Black vigilantes."

The common thread, Giridharadas writes, spans the far right and far left alike: "we're abandoned, the system's rigged, no one's listening, take matters into your own hands."

The takeaway in plain words: two men in one subway car, and a country that let both of them down.