"I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage."

 Said JD Vance, quoted in "Daniel Penny accepts VP-elect JD Vance's invite to be his 'personal guest' at the Army-Navy game Saturday. "

"If you’re faced with all these challenges, you have to remain calm. What’s the point of worrying about something..."

"... worrying is not going to make your problems disappear. I attribute this to my father and grandfather. They are very very stoic."

Said Daniel Penny, quoted in "Daniel Penny, charged in Jordan Neely death, breaks silence: 'I am not a white supremacist'" (NY Post).

Asked about something Al Sharpton said about him, Penny said he wasn't sure who Al Sharpton was: "I don’t really know celebrities that well."

Celebrities.

And he doesn't know what's going on in social media: "I don’t follow anyone, and I don’t have social media because I really don’t like the attention and I just think there are better ways to spend your time. I don’t like the limelight."

"In the conservative defense of [Daniel] Penny, a pernicious analogy is visible."

"Police instructor and Army veteran David Grossman writes... that 'an old war veteran' once told him about wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. 'If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep,' he continues. A person with 'a capacity for violence and no empathy' for his fellows is 'an aggressive sociopath — a wolf.' To stop them, there are sheepdogs. 'But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens?' Grossman asks. 'Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path.'"

Writes Sarah Jones in "The Sheepdog Defense" (NY Magazine).

This animal analogy is awfully facile. Is anyone really thinking about the case by likening human beings to these 3 kinds of animals? It seems to me that nearly everyone regards Jordan Neely as mentally ill. Wolves aren't mentally ill. 

"[Jordan Neely] was on a list informally known as the Top 50, a roster of people in a city of eight million who stand out for the severity of their troubles..."

"... and their resistance to accepting help. The list is overseen by a task force of city agency workers and social-service nonprofits; when homeless-outreach workers see someone in the subway who is on the list, they are supposed to notify the city and try to get that person to a shelter. Despite that, and an open arrest warrant, Mr. Neely was out on his own on May 1, when he began ranting at passengers. A Marine veteran, Daniel Penny, grabbed him and choked him to death; Mr. Penny has now been charged with manslaughter.... At a news conference on Thursday, Councilwoman Pierina Sanchez, referring to Mr. Neely’s presence on the list, said: 'Our city knew exactly who Jordan was, where he was and what his history was. And yet we failed him.'... The goal of the list is to connect disparate bureaucracies across a vast city...."

 
From "Jordan Neely Was on New York’s 'Top 50' List of Homeless People at Risk/Mr. Neely, who was killed by another subway rider, was on a watch list for a city task force that kept track of the New Yorkers of most concern" (NYT).

The city failed more than just Jordan Neely. It failed everyone who felt threatened by him, including the one who felt called to apply force to stop him and who now may go to prison for misjudging the extent to which the law permits the application of force, and everyone who sees what is happening to Daniel Penny and feels constrained, going forward, about taking any action in the presence of a threat and who must nevertheless go underground and shut themselves into subway cars that may or may not carry a "Top 50" person and who are given only the insulting comfort of the knowledge that the city's disparate bureaucracies are connected.

"Daniel Penny, the 24-year-old Marine veteran who choked and killed a homeless man on the subway last week, will face a charge of second-degree manslaughter..."

"The police interviewed Mr. Penny, but initially released him without charging him. The struggle on the F train was captured in a four-minute video showing Mr. Penny choking [Jordan] Neely and holding on for an additional 50 seconds after Mr. Neely stopped struggling. The video set off protests, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office began investigating soon afterward."

The NYT reports.

"Left-leaning politicians criticized Mayor Eric Adams for his muted initial response to the killing. But on Wednesday, the mayor gave a speech in which he said Mr. Neely’s 'life mattered' and that his death was a 'tragedy that never should have happened.' He did not make any references to Mr. Penny, however, and a spokesman for his office did not immediately comment on the district attorney’s decision to charge him."

"Riders on the subway deserve to have a ride where they don’t feel threatened. And the mentally ill deserve to have the treatment and the protection..."

"... that would allow them to work out their struggles in the protected space. We can’t have a subway system that’s both a system of transportation and housing for the homeless. Those are incompatible goals."

 Said Gregory Umbach, associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, quoted in "After homeless man choked on subway, NYC grapples with treatment of mentally ill" (WaPo).

The incident makes me think of Bernhard Goetz, and reading on, I see he's briefly mentioned in the article:

One of the most famous incidents occurred in 1984, when Bernhard Goetz, a White man, shot four Black teenagers he said he believed were going to rob him. Goetz became a folk hero in a city dealing with sky-high crime. The media called him the “Subway Vigilante.”... 

It would be good to say more about why he became a folk hero. It is, I think, evidence of how oppressed ordinary people felt about what they had been forced to endure on the subway — or felt forced to endure. Goetz represented the idea of somehow fighting for your right to be left alone in this public space. 

But the Goetz case was different. The young men he shot were simply criminals, robbers, on the subway to find victims. Neely was, it seems, mentally ill and on the subway for shelter. 

"This honestly feels like a new low: not being able to clearly condemn a public murder because the victim was of a social status some would deem ‘too low’ to care about."

Tweeted Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, quoted in "Mayor Adams rips AOC for rush to conclude that Jordan Neely was 'murdered'" (NY Post).

The city medical examiner ruled Wednesday that Neely’s death was a homicide due to “compression of neck (chokehold).” Witnesses say that Neely was having a mental episode when another straphanger, identified as a 24-year-old Marine from Queens, took him down from behind and placed him in a chokehold for about 15 minutes. Still, Adams stressed that there are “so many unknowns at this time.”