USA Today referred to the deceased Mr. Neely as a “
beloved subway performer” who hailed from “a whole family of musicians.” The spin from CNN was that he was a “
Michael Jackson impersonator,” known for dressing up as the King of Pop and performing unsolicited but charming dance numbers on the train. To a citizen casually observing, the impression might well be that Neely was a harmless jester, killed by a brutish (and possibly racist?) white man for
dancing.
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It tracks closely with the broader narrative underlying the entire Black Lives Matter movement.
www.nationalreview.com
Of course, this is not at all what actually happened. In reality, the tragic struggle that killed Neely began when he went nuts on a subway car packed with riders, screaming violent threats: “
I will hurt anyone on this train . . . I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison!” He was restrained by three men who stepped forward — not simply the one whom major news outlets seem grimly intent on making famous — including a black guy.
Placed in a “rear naked choke” hold, which is generally but not always nonfatal, he tragically died. Although it is too early to say for sure, drugs may well have played some role in Neely’s death:
He was a regular user of powerful designer synthetics like K2. In any case, what we saw on that New York train could theoretically be a manslaughter-2-level case of excessive force, but was rather obviously not the unprovoked “
lynching” of an urban icon by a bigot.
And, speaking frankly, it probably was not manslaughter. The subway riders’ perceptions of danger — including those of at least one highly trained fighting man — were in all likelihood not only real but dead-on accurate. Thanks in large part to citizen journalists online, we now know that Jordan Neely had
42 previous arrests, many for subway violence.
At the time of the fatal struggle, he had an
active criminal warrant, earned for
punching a 67-year-old grandmother, breaking her nose and fracturing her orbital bone. On another occasion, and for God only knows what reason, Neely tried to kidnap a small child, briefly
snatching a seven-year-old girl. Almost unbelievably, there exists a decade-old Reddit thread — recently discovered by the
street reporter Andy Ngo — that consists of New York taxpayers documenting the subway crimes of Jordan Neely. The title? “
Try to stay away from the Michael Jackson impersonator.” Simply put: Neely was seen as a disturbed and dangerous man — because he was.
thefederalist.com
