An eyewitness to the fatal chokehold of homeless man Jordan Neely by Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny aboard a New York City subway car said that she was thankful the vet intervened and that Neely was threatening harm to the passengers on the train before Penny stepped in to stop him.
That eyewitness called Penny a hero to Fox News Digital, saying, “He’s a hero.” She then went on to add that she thinks what Penny did was both self-defense and saved the other passengers on the train from getting hurt, saying, “It was self-defense, and I believe in my heart that he saved a lot of people that day that could have gotten hurt.”
Why is that? Because, in her view, Neely was acting erratically and threatening to harm the train’s passengers. “I’m sitting on a train reading my book, and, all of a sudden, I hear someone spewing this rhetoric. He said, ‘I don’t care if I have to kill an F, I will. I’ll go to jail, I’ll take a bullet,’” she said.
She added that the passengers were terrified of what might happen to them at Neely’s hands, saying, “I’m looking at where we are in the tube, in the sardine can, and I’m like, ‘OK, we’re in between stations. There’s nowhere we can go.’ The people on that train, we were scared. We were scared for our lives.”
She also told Fox News Digital that Neely’s talk of taking a bullet frightened them, as he would only be shot at for committing acts of violence. In her words, “Why in the world would you take a bullet? Why? You don’t take a bullet because you’ve snatched something from somebody’s hand. You take a bullet for violence.”
Continuing, she added, “Nobody wants to kill anybody. Mr. Penny didn’t want to kill that man. You should have seen the way Mr. Penny looked. He was distraught. He was very, very, very visibly distressed. And he didn’t go. He didn’t run. He stayed.”
She also said, “This isn’t about race. This is about people of all colors who were very, very afraid and a man who stepped in to help them. Race is being used to divide us.”
The witness added that NYC has been sliding back towards a crime-ridden hellscape with Guiliani gone, saying, “I miss the city under the law and order of Giuliani. When it comes to exposing people or subjecting them to violent behavior, the people who are in power and supposed to protect us are not.” Then, adding to that, she also said, “It’s not looking that good for us. You know, we were supposed to be an example to other nations but are turning into a Third World country.”
So far, Daniel Penny’s defense fund has raised over $2.5 million to help him fight off the legal assault launched by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, but the witness worried that wasn’t enough, saying, “I hope that they raise more because it’s going to cost a pretty penny, no pun intended, to get this young man justice.”
Watch Penny’s arrest here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded PBS video
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