NEW YORK (AP) – After being acquitted of murder, the veteran who drowned a mentally ill man on the New York subway told an interviewer that he put himself in a “vulnerable position” but felt compelled to act.
“I’m going to take a million in lawsuits and people calling me names and people hating on me, so that one of these people doesn’t get hurt or killed,” Daniel Penny told Fox News in a brief released Tuesday, the day after the verdict. .
Meanwhile, many New Yorkers protested the sentence, holding signs and chanting Jordan Neely’s name in a Manhattan square Tuesday night.
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“Yes, he was being unreasonable. But I personally don’t think that mental illness and homelessness is a crime that deserves death,” said one of the organizers, Sean Blackmon.
An anonymous Manhattan jury acquitted Penny of criminal homicide in the death of Neely, 30. A jury had concluded last week on the felony count of first degree murder, which was dismissed.
Penny, who had served four years in the Marines, held Neely in a chokehold for about six minutes after Neely went on a rampage that shocked subway riders on May 1, 2023. Penny is white. Neely was Black.
According to the passengers, Neely had not touched anyone but expressed a desire to die, to go to prison – even murder, some said. The former street performer was homeless, had schizophrenia, had synthetic marijuana in his system and had been convicted of assaulting people at train stations.
In her first statement since the story broke, Penny told Jeanine Pirro that she is “not a controversial person.” But he said he would not be able to live “because of the guilt I would have felt if someone had been hurt, if he had done what he is threatening to do.”
He said he put himself in a “vulnerable position” as he held Neely down the tracks.
“As soon as I let him go, I’m behind me now, he can just turn around and start doing what he told me to do… to kill, to hurt,” Penny said in the episode, released ahead of the planned release. full interview Wednesday on the Fox Nation streaming service.
Penny, 26, also criticized the officials who sued her as “selfish,” pointing out that they refused to review their duties in the circumstances that led to her encounter with Neely.
“This is their ineffective approach,” Penny said. But, he added, “their interests are too great to admit that they are lost.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat whose office brought the case, said after the verdict that prosecutors “followed the facts and the evidence from start to finish.” His office was unavailable for comment Tuesday.
During the month-long trial, prosecutors said Penny overreacted to Neely, who did not have a gun. The soldier’s lawyers argued that he put his safety on the line to protect other passengers from a threatening man.
The case sparked a national debate and divided New Yorkers over homelessness and public safety in a city where millions ride the subway every day.
Penny chose not to testify at trial, but an anonymous jury heard what she told police in the minutes and hours after her encounter with Neely. Describing Neely as a “crazy person” who was “acting like a crazy person,” Penny said she put the man in a container and “took him out” so he wouldn’t hurt anyone.
“I’m not trying to kill the man,” he told detectives in a taped interview. “I’m just trying to de-escalate the situation.”
A city medical examiner concluded that the seizure killed Neely, but Penny’s defense disputed the findings.
Jurors heard testimony from others on the train and watched videos recorded by others. The jury also heard from police, doctors, a psychologist, the Marine Corps instructor who taught Penny the chokehold technique and Penny’s relatives, friends and other Marines.