Editor’s Note: At the time this editorial was published, the family of Jordan Neely was preparing to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the man who held him in a chokehold on the floor of a NYC subway, resulting in his death.
On May 1, 2023 a Black homeless street artist named Jordan Neely, 30, was walking through a New York City subway car, where he often performed as Michael Jackson, saying he was ‘hungry, thirsty, had little to live for and was ready to die’ [quote from a CNN report]. According to witnesses he wasn’t being physically threatening nor did he attack anyone. In the same subway car, ex-Marine Daniel Perry confronted Neely, forced him to the floor of the car and held him in a chokehold for about 15 minutes, as a couple other men helped hold him down.
In a video of the incident, bystanders can be heard calling for Perry to let him go. While in the chokehold, he lost consciousness, and medical responders couldn’t resuscitate him. He was taken to a hospital, where he was declared deceased.
Perry was questioned and released, but because of video footage going viral and public outcry, the death has now been ruled by the coroner a homicide, and Perry held on second-degree manslaughter charges. Further details about how the incident unfolded are being withheld, but attorneys for the murdered man’s family are calling the assailant ‘a killer.’
Outrage at this deadly vigilantism quickly spread across the country. Once again people are calling for justice, asking how this could keep happening, another life snuffed out for the crime of color, poverty, want — whether the executioner is a cop or a person who believes he has a right to snuff out another’s life for the crime of crying out his distress.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in a statement on Twitter, called the action ‘murder’: “Jordan was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself. While many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected w/ passive headlines + no charges.”
Jordan Neely was Black and houseless in the city with the largest population of homeless people in the country, over 60,000. He was on a list of the City’s homeless with acute needs. The torture of living exposed, abandoned and houseless, without the basics of a decent life, was — along with the man who murdered him — his executioner. As is the chorus of propaganda echoed by many politicians and the media that homeless lives are lesser, justifying neglect, incarceration, violence and even murder against them, instead of care, support and housing.
As homelessness grows and spreads, as jobs are lost to outsourcing, mass automation and AI, as foreclosures and evictions increase, and as once stable people and families wind up living in their vehicles, tents and in the streets, as hunger and despair become the reality of millions of working and formerly-working people, the powers that be are eager to blame the victims of a crumbling economic system for their suffering. To this end, they scapegoat the dispossessed as criminals, crazies and addicts: all these things are byproducts of an unjust system that destroys lives. We must demand that the government prioritize human needs — including housing and mental health care — above war and tax breaks for billionaires. And prosecute the vigilante who took Jordan Neely’s life.
Justice for Jordan Neely!
San Francisco poet Sarah Menefee is a long-time homeless rights activist. She is the Homeless Desk on the People’s Tribune Editorial Board. She is a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, the Revolutionary Poets Brigade and 'First they came for the homeless'. Her latest collections of poetry are Human Star and CEMENT.
