On May 1, 2023, as the world began to get word of a death on the New York subway, a video clip began to make the online rounds. It showed a chokehold on the floor of an uptown F train — the incident at the heart of my new book, MAN IN THE MIRROR.
But there is another video at the burning heart of the case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny that I’m betting you haven’t seen: the interview of Penny by detectives shortly after the incident.
For my new YouTube investigative series accompanying the book, we are taking one piece of evidence at a time and unspooling the reporting slowly, to show you the work.
This week, in the first episode of the show, Emma Goldberg of The New York Times and I break down the interrogation video most of the world hasn’t seen which ended up being pivotal to the government’s bringing a case against Penny for allegedly causing Neely’s death. Did one word used by Penny change the course of this case?
Here’s what we see in those thirty minutes of the interview: two detectives and a young Marine veteran first finding common ground, swapping unit numbers and deployment stories, and then, slowly, the ground shifting under all three of them.
In this episode, Emma and I watch the tape together, minute by minute, and trace the exact point where the language changes, where the word “crackhead” enters the room, and where I observed the detectives quietly pulling away from camaraderie with Penny. It’s a small, human turn, and I’ve come to believe it explains more about why this case was brought, and why it went down the way it did, and why it matters not just on the level of two men or of a city but of the country itself, than almost anything else I found in two and a half years of reporting. I hope you’ll watch it with us.
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And tell me what you think:
Looking forward to the book. The salient aspect for me is Penny's manner. In particular, the insouciant way that he talks about his actions. (Compressing Jordan Neely's neck - for six minutes - continuing even while someone pleads with him to stop because he was killing Jordan Neely, and continuing even after Jordan had stopped moving.)
The cause of death ruled as compression of the neck. Penny, describing it: "He's still, like, squirming around, and still, you know, going crazy."
Perhaps Jordan Neely was like, you know, afraid for his life, since he was being choked to death, and that's why we was still, like, squirming around.
As always, so thought provoking. So good, Anand. Who, indeed, do we want to be as a people, a country?