On the Murder of Jordan Neely
Jordan Neely, an NYC man experiencing a mental health crisis, was choked to death by former Marine Daniel Penny on the F train. According to witnesses, Penny walked up behind Neely, who was not engaging Penny in any way, put Neely in a rear naked choke, and held it for close to fifteen minutes, killing him. Penny will stand trial this coming October. As a practicing martial artist, I know that it only takes about ten seconds to render someone unconscious using this technique. To many, myself included, Neely’s death is a murder. Yet, not surprisingly, some are calling Penny a hero.
Video footage from a bystander who filmed the altercation and posted it online, where it soon went viral, shows Penny staring into the phone camera with a terrifyingly steady and reassured resolve. In a subsequent NY Post interview, Penny expressed his need for “excitement” and “adventure” since being discharged from the military. And he explained that he drove through South and Central America looking for danger and a “rush.” One could argue that by murdering Neely, Penny continued pursuing that rush — part of which may have stemmed from the hope that his extreme actions might end up on social media and go viral, giving him a perverse fame.
We’ve all seen a lot of disgusting violence online and stupid and harmful trends on social media: the Nyquil chicken challenge, the blackout challenge, the Benadryl challenge, and the silhouette challenge. They seem to go on forever, and some have had deadly results. People go to extremes to “go viral,” from licking toilet seats to jumping out of a moving car to accidentally dying of asphyxiation. Penny’s murder of Neely seems of a piece with one particular type of social-media trend: reels of martial artists quickly dispatching mostly untrained people they randomly encounter on the street. Mixed Martial Arts and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu seem to lead the way here. These reels feature practitioners engaging a mentally ill unhoused person, a drunk agitator, a belligerent “not so nice guy,” or someone having a mental health crisis. A slew of social media accounts exists to break down these encounters, provide play-by-play of fistfights and scrums, and offer tips for counter-attacks or finishing moves. These accounts are popular. I watch them and try to learn from them. But I do wonder if they glorify this type of violence and the actors within that violence. It seems to me that some people are actively looking to go viral via one of these violent altercations. We can’t know definitively, but the number of videos fuels speculation.
Some people see these martial-arts clips as “hashtag hero” scenarios: A person saves the day. As martial artists we have to be aware that there is another way of looking at it: the martial artist might actually be escalating the situation. The most common martial arts techniques in these viral videos are the seated mount, knee on belly, the armbar, or the infamous rear naked choke. In the seated mount position, the practitioner sits atop their opponent’s chest, knees on the ground, and holds down the opponent’s arms. The knee-on-belly creates pain and discomfort by pushing the knee into the abdomen, thus controlling the attacker; this is a transition position to more secure submission. In the armbar position, the attacker knows that somebody will break their arm if they don’t stop resisting. A person can execute the rear naked choke from a standing position or on the ground. This choke is a “constriction” choke as it cuts off blood and oxygen flowing from the carotid arteries to the brain. When performed correctly, a person in this chokehold will lose consciousness in about ten seconds. The person in the chokehold can suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen to the brain and die if choked for too long.
Many trained martial artists have used these techniques or ones like them to contribute to public safety. Adrian Urbano, an airport employee in Vancouver, Canada, used a seated mount and arm lock to subdue a violent passenger that physically attacked him first. Ro Malabanan, a martial arts instructor, stopped a man randomly punching people on the streets of SOHO in New York City.
When martial artists and former military use their skills responsibly, martial artists and their arts are a boon to society. However, some are not well-adjusted members of our community, and the result might be the complete opposite. They could put themselves and others in danger.
Business marketing professor Jonah Berger’s 2013 book, Contagious: Why things catch on, explores reasons why things go viral. Essentially, people are creating and sharing content they believe makes them look good or cool. By now most social media users understand that if they can create an emotional response people will share their content. For Penny, this response takes the form of New Yorker’s attitudes towards the city’s mentally ill homeless population. Reaction to the video supports the opinion that “somebody has to do something.” People love stories. The story of a New Yorker that isn’t going to put up with the inconvenience of public outbursts by the mentally ill, as sickening as it sounds, is still a story. If we question why content goes viral, we also have to investigate the psychology behind why people want to go viral and why we’re addicted to this phenomenon.
In his blog post on nfx.com (The Network Effects), James Currier explains why we believe we should go viral and why we engage in and spread viral content. Currier provides detailed information drawn from complex studies. He explains that a big reason people share things is to project their own identity onto a “tribe” that’s somewhere out there. Penny views himself as a hero, a soldier charged with protecting people. He thinks he’s being helpful. This feeds a sense of validation and provides readymade voyeurism for those who might want to inflict violence on the more vulnerable members of our society. “People are highly motivated to share things … about high-profile people or people, they don’t like because it helps unite them with others in common judgment/disdain.”
Jordan Neely was thirty years old. At the time of his murder, he was homeless and having a mental health crisis. He did not deserve to die. It must be repeated that in the video footage of Penny murdering Neely, Penny stares into the phone camera with a terrifyingly steady resolve.
How does his status as a former Marine, the son of a career NYC cop, and his white identity contribute to this murder? How does the murder of a mentally ill, Black, unhoused man make him appear helpful to others? What kind of fear justifies and validates the murder of the unhoused in NYC? Or, in particular, a rapidly gentrifying NYC? Some of us know the answers to these questions, but many more don’t want to know. The same public who would call Penny a hero and donate close to two million dollars for his legal defense, would complain about the mentally ill unhoused who ride the subway, and would lean on the discriminatory rhetoric of “law and order.” They might also fetishize the murder of unhoused people. If that compassionless public is trained in martial arts, armed with handguns or rifles, or itching to prove themselves by choosing violence in front of a cell phone camera, they might go viral. And that fifteen minutes of fame could claim a human life.
As long as we choose to consume violence in this form, people will actively try to produce it.
Roberto Carlos Garcia is the author of five books. Four poetry collections, most recently What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems, and an essay collection, Traveling Freely, forthcoming in October 2024 from Northwestern University Press. Roberto writes extensively about the Black Diasporic and Black Latinx experience. He is a 2023 NJ State Council of the Arts Fellow. Roberto has been published widely and is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit. He is a second-degree black belt in Japanese Aiki-Jujutsu.
