Daniel Penny, the veteran charged with manslaughter in the death of a New York City subway rider, disputed an eyewitness account that he held Jordan Neely in a chokehold and defended himself in video statements recorded and released by his attorneys.
Penny, a 24-year-old Marine veteran, defended his actions in the four clips shared Sunday. The May 1 interaction was partially captured on cellphone video and Penny was seen on the ground holding Neely, 30, in a chokehold on a northbound F Train in New York City.
Neely was homeless and a known subway busker who often performed as Michael Jackson.
Neely was unconscious when officers arrived to the Broadway and East Houston Street subway station and pronounced dead at a hospital, New York police said. The city’s medical examiner officer said Neely died from “compression of neck (chokehold)” and declared the manner as a homicide.
In his statements Sunday, Penny reiterated prior remarks that he did not intend to choke Neely and was attempting to restrain him. He also disputed the account of Juan Alberto Vazquez, who recorded the video and has said that Penny held Neely in a chokehold position for about 15 minutes.
“Some people say that I was holding onto Mr. Neely for 15 minutes. This is not true,” Penny said. “Between stops, it was only a couple of minutes, so the whole interaction, less than five minutes.”
Vazquez’s video does not show what happened before Neely was restrained. Vazquez told NBC New York that Neely had entered the train that day and began to give a “somewhat aggressive speech.”
Neely told passengers that “he was hungry, he was thirsty, that he didn’t care about anything, he didn’t care about going to jail, he didn’t care that he gets a big life sentence,” according to Vasquez.
Penny accused Neely of uttering violent threats. He said he fearful of Neely and “couldn’t sit still” as he saw women and children being threatened.
“I was listening to music at the time, and he was yelling so I took my headphones out to hear what he was yelling,” Penny said in his video statement. “And the three main threats that he repeated over and over was ‘I’m going to kill you,’ ‘I’m prepared to go to jail for life,’ and ‘I’m willing to die.'”
In the video statements, Penny also defended how he restrained Neely. He said that he adjusted his grip on Neely “based on the force that he’s exerting” and that Neely was breathing in the video.
“I was praying that the police would come and take this situation over,” he said. “I didn’t want to be put in that situation, but I couldn’t just sit still and let him carry out these threats.”
A lawyer for Neely’s family did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News, but Neely’s family has previously rejected accusations that Neely threatened physical violence.
“It is a character assassination and a clear example of why he believed he was entitled to take Jordan’s life,” the attorneys, Donte Mills and Lennon Edwards, said in a May statement.
Penny also said the accusations that he, a white man, was motivated by race to harm Neely were ridiculous. He previously denied accusations that his decision to restrain Neely, a Black man, was racially motivated when he told the New York Post that he was ” not a white supremacist.”
“I didn’t see a Black man threatening passengers, I saw a man threatening passengers,” Penny said Sunday.
Mills issued a statement about Penny’s New York Post interview regarding Penny’s remarks on not being a “white supremacist.”
“This is an advertisement to soften the public’s view of Daniel Penny who choked Jordan Neely to death,” Mills said at the time. “We never called him a white supremacist, we called him a killer.”
Penny was arrested in May and charged with second-degree manslaughter. Neely’s family has said that they believe the charge is too lenient and “should be for murder.”
Neely’s family has said that he began struggling with mental illness at the age of 14 after the murder of his mother.
Christine Neely was killed in 2007, stuffed inside a suitcase and left on the Henry Hudson Parkway in New York, NJ.com reported.
Neely testified in the trial of his mother’s boyfriend Shawn Southerland, that he tried to say goodbye to his mother before school April 4, 2007. But Southerland refused to let him enter the bedroom and Southerland packed up and left, according to NJ.com.
Southerland was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
