The worthies of the communist-founded American Civil Liberties Union never met a dangerous criminal they didn’t like or want on the streets, and schizophrenic criminal Jordan Neely was no exception for NYCLU, the group’s New York affiliate.
He just needed some help, the far-left outfit tweeted, and he never would have fallen victim to Daniel Penny, who subdued Neely with a chokehold on a subway train when he threatened passengers. Neely later died of multiple causes, but not Penny’s restraint.
“This case will forever be a symbol of New York’s failure to adequately care for people with mental health needs and those experiencing homelessness,” the NYCLU wrote on X after a jury acquitted Penny.
He was, as the delinquent Jets sang to Officer Krupke in West Side Story, “depraved on account I’m deprived.”
Not so, a community note reminded NYCLU. Neely had the chance to reform himself after he attacked a woman. He refused.
Left unsaid: NYCLU led the charge to keep the mentally ill such as Neely out of mental hospitals.
“Root Drivers”
After a jury deadlocked on a second-degree manslaughter charge on Friday, it declared Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide on Monday.
Straphangers on the subway on May 1, 2023 were terrified when Neely said “someone is going to die” and appeared “satanic,” a witness said. Thinking Neely might harm or even kill someone, Penny put Neely in a chokehold. An expert witness later said the chokehold didn’t kill Neely. Instead, his own multiple illnesses, including sickle cell disease, along with “synthetic marijuana” ended his life.
After the jury freed Penny, NYCLU blamed the system.
“Jordan Neely deserved basic human rights: a safe place to live, enough to eat, and access to mental healthcare,” the far-left outfit wrote:
He should still be alive today.
It’s time for New York leaders to seriously address the root drivers of homelessness and our chronic lack of mental health care.
Except for one thing, readers noted, pointing to The New York Times’ account of Neely’s criminal career after he died:
As part of a plea agreement with prosecutors after he punched a 67-year-old woman in the street in 2021, Jordan Neely was given free access to stable housing and health care at a treatment facility in the Bronx. He abandoned the facility after 13 days.
Times Story
Far from “falling through the cracks,” as the far-left argot about the Neelys of this world goes, social welfare workers had Neely under a microscope.
“He was well known for years to the social work teams that reach out to homeless people on the subways, and had hundreds of encounters with them, according to an employee of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a nonprofit organization that does subway outreach for the city,” the newspaper reported:
Mr. Neely was on what outreach workers refer to as the “Top 50” list — a roster maintained by the city of the homeless people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment. He was taken to hospitals numerous times, both voluntarily and involuntarily, said the employee, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss his history.
Neely was arrested more than 40 times, and not just for petty crimes such as turnstile jumping.
“At least four” arrests “were on charges of punching people, two of them in the subway system.”
Neely was also a K2 (synthetic marijuana) addict:
In June 2019, an outreach worker noticed that Mr. Neely had lost considerable weight and was sleeping upright. Around that time, he was reported to have banged on a booth agent’s door and threatened to kill her, according to the worker’s notes. Then he was gone.
In other words, Neely was in constant contact with either cops or social workers. The authorities did not ignore his crimes or his plight. The city’s “Intensive Mobile Treatment team — one of the squads of mental health clinicians who minister to people in streets and shelters” — also cared for Neely. They carted him off to Bellevue mental hospital. There he stayed for a week.
Turned Violent
Three years ago, “Neely’s aggression seemed to peak, when he punched a 67-year-old woman in the street on the Lower East Side, the police said,” the Times continued:
The woman suffered severe facial injuries, including a broken nose, according to court documents. He was charged with assault and, awaiting the resolution of his case, spent 15 months in jail, the police said, though his family said the stint was shorter.
He pleaded guilty on Feb. 9 of this year, in a carefully planned strategy between the city and his lawyers to allow him to get treatment and stay out of prison.
“Do you know what the goal is today?” the judge, Ellen M. Biben, asked at the hearing.
“Yes,” Mr. Neely replied.
“What is that goal?”
“To make it physically and mentally to the program.”
If Neely went to a facility and stayed off drugs for 15 months, “his felony conviction would be reduced.” Neely vowed to take his meds and quit drugs. He would not, he promised, “leave the facility without permission.”
He broke that promise, the Times reported:
“This is a wonderful opportunity to turn things around, and we’re glad to give it to you,” Mary Weisgerber, a prosecutor, said.
“Thank you so much,” Mr. Neely replied.
But just 13 days later, he abandoned the facility. Judge Biben issued a warrant for his arrest.
In March, an outreach worker saw him in the subway, neatly dressed, calm and subdued, and got him a ride to a shelter in the Bronx. (The outreach workers typically do not check for arrest warrants when interacting with homeless people.) But a downward spiral followed.
On April 8, when outreach workers approached him in a subway car at the end of the line in Coney Island, Mr. Neely urinated in front of them. When an outreach worker went to call the police, according to a worker’s notes, Mr. Neely shouted, “Just wait until they get here, I got something for you, just wait and see.”
Cops tossed him from the train. They didn’t know about the warrant.
An outreach worker wrote that the “aggressive and incoherent” Neely, the Times reported, “could be a harm to others or himself if left untreated.”
In other words, the NYCLU missed all the people who tried to help Neely: “outreach workers,” “the Intensive Mobile Treatment team,” the judge, the prosecutor, and his attorneys during his assault case, and, one more time, “an outreach worker.”
He went berserk on the subway three weeks later.
Something else NYCLU didn’t mention. It repeatedly sued to keep the mentally ill from being involuntarily committed. It likely would have sued the city on Neely’s behalf had it confined him to a facility against his will.
As the ACLU brags at its website:
In Wyatt v. Stickney (1972) and Wyatt v. Aderholt (1974), [attorney Bruce Ennis] challenged the conditions of hospitalization for those with mental illness and developmental disabilities, leading to significant reductions in the institutions’ populations.
And those “significant reductions” undoubtedly led to people just such as Neely becoming homeless.
Had Neely been institutionalized, he would be alive.
