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CV NEWS FEED // Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently implied that Daniel Penny, 26, a Marine Corps veteran currently on trial for manslaughter and negligent homicide, acted in the interests of subway passengers when he put an erratic homeless man in a chokehold.
The man Penny subdued, 30-year-old Jordan Neeley, later died from his injuries. Penny was 24 years old at the time of the May 2023 incident on the New York City Subway system’s F Train.
FOX News noted that Neely “had a long rap sheet, a history of mental illness and an active arrest warrant at the time he died.”
Adams told radio host and former two-time Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino that he hopes the jury “hear all the facts” of the case and based on “all the facts that’s laid out … will make the right decision.”
“I don’t want to prejudge that,” the mayor added.
During the same appearance on The Rob Astorino Show this past weekend, Adams also stated that the situation at hand “could have easily been a case where you saw three innocent people murdered on our street two weeks ago.”
“We have to recognize we have a mental health crisis, and we’re not doing enough to solve it,” Adams said:
Now, we’re on the subway where we’re hearing someone talking about hurting people, killing people. You have someone on that subway who was responding, doing what we should have done as a city in a state of having a mental health facility. Those passengers were afraid.
>> LAST YEAR: DANIEL PENNY PLEADS NOT GUILTY <<
“I’ve been on the subway system. I know what it is as a police officer to wrestle or fight with someone,” added the mayor, a former New York Police Department (NYPD) captain who in 2021 ran on a platform often described as relatively anti-crime for a Democrat. “It is imperative that we look at the totality of this problem.”
“Then you look at the complete failure of our mental health system, a complete failure,” the mayor also said:
From the days of closing psychiatric wards and having those who needed help just turned over into the street without giving any safety net to accept them. Reach out to me all the time and say, I’m watching my child go down, or my loved one, my family, and we’re going down this serious decline. What do we do? A system where you brought people into hospitals, gave them medicine for one day, and sent them back.
Speaking to Adams, Astorino characterized the fact that Penny is even on trial to begin with as “emblematic of what’s going on in New York City right now, at least in the minds of some.”
“People can’t understand why this guy who came to the rescue of others, where Jordan Neely was clearly mentally disturbed and very threatening, he is the guy now on trial because of Alvin Bragg,” Astorino said, naming the controversial Democratic New York County District Attorney.
FOX News noted that during the fateful day, Neely “stepped onto the train, threw his jacket on the floor and began making death threats, warning that he wasn’t afraid to die, to go back to jail or to spend life in prison.”
CatholicVote reported in June 2023 that the homeless man’s “history of mental instability” dated back to “his mother’s murder when he was a teenager.”
“According to passengers, Neely entered the subway car and began panhandling and screaming at them,” CatholicVote’s report of the May 2023 incident indicated.
Neely “often performed in the subway as Michael Jackson and had an extensive criminal record that included previous assaults on subway passengers, such as punching a 67-year-old woman in the face two years ago,” CatholicVote added.
>> RELATED: ADAMS DARES CRITICS TO ‘CANCEL’ HIM OVER BORDER STANCE <<
