Marine Corps Vet Daniel Penny Appears on Video, Tells the World What Really Happened on NYC Subway
CORRECTION, June 14, 2023: Daniel Penny is a veteran of the Marine Corps. An earlier version of this article and its title included a different description of his service.
The tragic controversy surrounding the death of New Yorker Jordan Neely has taken another turn after a series of powerful videos were uploaded to social media.
Neely, who died after being restrained by Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny on a New York City subway in May, has been painted by much of the establishment media and left-leaning punditry as a completely innocent victim who needed a strait jacket more than a chokehold.
Penny is now directly refuting many of those claims in a series of videos that his legal team uploaded to social media.
The “Law & Crime Network” uploaded one of those critical videos:
“At Second Avenue, a man came on, [he] stumbled on,” Penny recounted in the video interview. “He appeared to be on drugs.”
How did Penny reach that conclusion?
“The doors closed, and he ripped his jacket off, and [violently] threw it at the people sitting to my left,” Penny explained. “I was listening to music at the time, and he was yelling, so I took my headphones out to hear what he was yelling.
“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.'”
Indeed, it’s hard for a protector mindset to just be turned off, which can be true of Penny’s military background.
In this instance, Penny insisted that he genuinely felt afraid for the other travelers (Penny noted that he’s 6-foot-2, and Neely was bigger than him) and had to act.
It was then that Penny revealed perhaps his most illuminating claim: The entire incident was not a prolonged chokehold as had been portrayed by initial accounts of the incident.
“Some people say that I was holding onto Mr. Neely for 15 minutes,” Penny said. “This is not true.”
Penny went on to defend his actions as having taken place over the course of “less than five minutes.”
He also stressed that the sole purpose of his actions was to subdue Neely and nothing more.
“I was trying to restrain him.”
Penny also refuted the claims that his actions had anything to do with race.
“I didn’t see a black man threatening passengers,” Penny explained. “I saw a man threatening passengers, a lot of whom were people of color.”
And in case anyone was thinking that Penny somehow acted for clout or glory, he refuted those claims too.
“I don’t believe that I’m a hero,” Penny noted.
Penny, 24, has formally been charged with second-degree manslaughter in the May 1 death of Neely, 30.
The Marine Corps vet faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on the charges brought forth by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
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