Jordan Neely killing/Daniel Penny charges

One charge of second-degree manslaughter and another charge of criminally negligent homicide.

 

To start, Lisa Miller is good. ... although I felt like she belabored some parts of the story. That said, you don't see enough profiles like that anymore. It felt like it was from years ago, not today.

On Neely. ...

He punched a woman in the face in a deli (less than a year after he punched a man in the face @ the W. 4th Street station). He was mentally ill.

My question, when he was given the “Alternative to Incarceration” treatment and sentenced to Harbor House with a warning to see it through and he said and did all the right things in court, but then he skipped out after less than 2 weeks. ... there is a long description of what he really needed and didn't get that seemed to absolve him. ... when what I saw as a choice he made. Was he ever responsible for anything he did, and the consequences of his own decisions?

I am not minimizing just how shitty an upbringing he had and how difficult his life was. His story is tragic. But the fault of that piece is that like a lot of things that start out sympathetic to Neely, it wants to make him so sympathetic and do the "the system failed him" thing that it subtly dismisses his bad decisions that it actually outlines with a line or two, while taking pains to paint descriptions of a variety of mitigating circumstances each step of the way.

For example, he had a long rap sheet, but it was only from his early days as a dancer for turnstile jumping, littering, and moving between cars. I get that turnstile jumping is not on par with the felonies he graduated to, but when you are getting arrested and just keep doing it, is it a systemic failure or is it simply you making the choice to be that guy?

What pushed him into his steep decline was K2. Did someone else make the choice to fuck around with that stuff for him? Whatever it did to him, could it also be characterized as a tragic consequence of bad decisions (likely without understanding just how bad) he actually had made for himself ?

That profile wasn't the worst offender I have seen, but so many people want to use Neely (and Penny) to try to paint unnuanced narratives. Neely certainly lived a shitty life that was stacked against him from early on. ... but what got him to that point on that train was not pure victimization. He had to have played a substantial role in his own life too, same as we all bare responsibility for ourselves. It's OK to simply acknowledge some very serious shades of gray around the Neely / Penny story.

 

Only his friends and people who loved him were quoted in the story. But if you believe the guy from his dance crew, Neely was doing relatively well until he started messing with K2.

As an adolescent, Jordan could sometimes be “off” — raging, depressive, introverted, distractible — but no one who knew him when he was young would have called him severely mentally ill. Yet by January 2013, when he was 20, Neely was telling police on 145th Street that his body was numb and he was hearing voices. Blizzard believes Neely had the seed of mental illness in him since he was a child, especially after what happened with his mother, but what pushed him into his steep decline was K2. “He always smoked a little weed, a little regular weed,” Blizzard says. “But someone gave him that K2 stuff — that’s what fucked him.”

Again, if you want to insist that Neely is a helpless victim who had no hand whatsoever in his own life, that is what you are going to see. But I am sure you can find people just like Jordan Neely. ...who didn't end up the way that Jordan Neely did. Like all of us, he had to have made choices and decisions, too, that had a hand in how tragically his life played out.

 

Maybe because I had no idea how you came to "How good is the "decision making" of a drug-addled schizophrenic?" from what I posted.

Of course by the time he was very far gone, he wasn't capable of making good decisions.

That piece was about how he got to there. I was commenting on how he got there. ... it's never as simple as, "He was a helpless victim with no hand in his own life.

He wasn't born a drug-addled schizophrenic. I quoted that graph from the piece which says nobody would have called him severely mentally ill when he was young, but his friend thinks he went downhill after he started messing around with K2.