A mentally ill homeless man was annoying people on the New York subway, so a couple of people held him down while a third choked him until, well, we could all be sure he’d never annoy anyone ever again. Nobody intervened. And now, The New York Times reports, the city is divided over what happened.
We have come to that moment in human devolution when we are divided over the merits of what I certainly see as a murder in plain sight. If Flannery O’Connor came back to life, she’d have to put her pen right back down again, because the grotesque has now become ordinary.
If a dog, or a squirrel, for that matter, had been snuffed out on the F train while posing a threat to no one, wouldn’t all non-sadists be appalled? A screaming homeless human, though, we’re not so sure about.
After the recent spate of shootings over nothing, in Kansas City and elsewhere, at least we all agreed that little girls shouldn’t be left bleeding over a ball that oops, got away from her and rolled into a neighbor’s yard. And for all of our differences, nobody said that a young man should by all means be shot in the head for ringing the wrong doorbell.
We do not, however, all agree that someone like 30-year-old Jordan Neely, who was held down for a good two minutes before he stopped moving, and then was held down for another 50 seconds more, ought to be breathing still even if we didn’t want to see, hear or smell him.
Maria Castaño, a 64-year-old interior designer in Brooklyn, told The Times that she sees the 24-year-old former Marine who killed Neely as a hero and Neely himself as someone who was, as the paper put it, “the recipient of justice.”
“I feel sorry for the man,” Castaño said, “but he was acting threatening.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams, a former transit cop, was no more humane: “We need to be extremely clear that from Day One of this administration, I focused on (the fact that) we cannot have people with severe emotional illnesses on our subway system,” he said. Be sure and let severely ill New Yorkers know exactly where it is that they are supposed to be severely ill without being subject to strangling, Mr. Mayor.
I spent much of the last year listening to unhoused people in California, and when they and their loved ones cry that they are seen as less than human, they aren’t exaggerating.
Neely was a subway performer and dancer whose act was canceled permanently because, as a witness told The Times, he had been yelling, “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up” and “ready to die.” Right after that, someone took him at his word.
He was frightening, the witness said, but had not assaulted or threatened anyone.
As it turned out, of course, Neely had more to fear than anyone else in that subway car did.
That no one moved to help him makes me think of that woman who was raped on a train near Philadelphia two years ago, while her fellow passengers sat and watched a man rip her clothes off and attack her for a full eight minutes.
Maybe they froze, I don’t know, but it shouldn’t have taken a lot of courage to call 911.
This latest attack, though, may be worse, because even after the fact, we can no longer so much as agree that the attacker was in the wrong.
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