In the spring of 2023, a young Black man stepped onto a subway car in Manhattan. He screamed, threw garbage at passengers, and announced that he was prepared to die. New Yorkers often encase themselves in psychological armor on the subway, but for many of the riders in that car, this was too much.
Terror flooded in. A woman hid her face in a friend’s chest; a mother tried to hide behind her stroller with her toddler. One man began to pray. Then a 24-year-old white man, an ex-Marine, grabbed the screaming man and put him in a neck lock, and five minutes later—by mistake? Intentionally?—left that man dead on the floor of the subway car.
To read the new book on that killing, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, by Anand Giridharadas, is to recognize that the membrane separating safety and fear on the New York City subways appeared in danger of rupturing by 2023. In the preceding few years, dozens of people had been pushed onto subway tracks, suffering injury or death. Murder and assault had risen sharply. The tension between chaos and order—often evident in New York—could be acute. And in those five minutes, it snapped.
By Giridharadas, Anand
Before anyone could sort out the facts, too many people rushed to impose narratives. Jordan Neely became the homeless Black man with the too-disposable life; Daniel Penny became the muscular vigilante who grew up in the white-bread suburbs. Leftist activists howled racism; right-wing sorts adjusted their ties and talked tough. “In a civilized society, the strong protect the weak,” a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote. “A Marine uses his strength to fight for those unable to fight for themselves.” Liberal politicians divined morality tales. Brad Lander, at the time the city comptroller, who lives in a prosperous liberal precinct in Brooklyn, proclaimed: “We must not become a city where a mentally ill human being can be choked to death by a vigilante without consequence.”
I wanted to say: Stop, please. Forgo reading your political catechisms. Try not to talk of consequences and militarization and the menace of the streets until we have a clue about how to prevent this from happening again.
There is pathos enough to be found in basic facts. In his book, Giridharadas takes on the considerable challenge of telling a story that encompasses conflicting narratives and the voices of nearly every player: defense attorneys, people living on the street, public-health officials, both Neely and Penny. His writing is most powerful when he traces the threads of tragically entwined lives. Whereas some in the media reduced Neely to a trope—the mentally ill homeless man—Man in the Mirror invests his life with complication and nuance. His mother was killed by her boyfriend; in a gothic twist, that boyfriend cross-examined young Jordan while representing himself at his trial. In time, Neely drifted further and further away from those who wanted to offer him succor. The reader learns about outreach workers and prosecutors who were ambivalent on how to treat his illness, and about well-meaning bureaucrats whose actions fell short.
Here and there, the author stumbles when inserting liberal punctuation points. He argues that addressing crime is an inescapable fact of life for Democrats, even if the fear that crime is out of control is “based in nonreality.” The biggest problem, he writes, is a nation “awash in anxiety and fear: of change, of the social advancement of marginalized populations, of losing control of children, of losing control of the border, of losing cultural status and centrality, of the Other, of chaos.” This strikes me as too easy.
Change, demographic and otherwise, has swept through and revitalized New York City for centuries. And the subways are arteries that give life to us all. I grew up riding the rails to see girlfriends and basketball games. My schoolmates and I rode to a Bronx public high school in train cars so encased in graffiti, we had to peer out of the opening doors to see if we’d reached our stop. Slowly, however, that system grew cleaner and safer.
When the coronavirus pandemic overtook New York City, that momentum seemed to reverse, and the subways began to feel menacing again. My claim here is reality-based, drawing on statistics and personal experience. Assaults on the subway increased by 65 percent from 2020 to 2025, and the number of murders in the system spiked as well. And a year after Neely died, a man shoved a friend of my family onto the subway tracks. He suffered multiple fractures, and his rehabilitation stretched across brutal months.
One morning in the spring of 2023, I was riding the Q train to the Upper East Side when I heard a booming voice and saw a great block of a man enter the subway car and ask for money. I returned to my reading. As the man approached, the timbre of his voice grew agitated. I fixed a side eye on him. When the train stopped in the middle of a tunnel, the panhandler stood over a young man who sat across from me. He put out a massive hand.
“You’re giving me money,” he announced. Silence followed as the young passenger kept eyes downcast. “Mutherfucker, I’ve got a big-ass knife”—the man patted his shaggy overcoat—“and I’m going to gut you from your balls to your throat.” I made eye contact with other men on the train. What the hell do we do if he pulls out that knife? If we are lucky enough to pull him to the floor, how do we keep him there?
I offer none of this to sound macho. I’m a 60-something man with a strong desire to remain alive. I harbored no illusions about my ability to wrestle this man to the ground. As it happened, the train started and pulled into the next station and he got off, but not before loudly vowing to gut us all.
I can venture a reasonable thumbnail sketch of this man. He was probably homeless. He was likely known to social-services caseworkers and to police. If he had been prescribed medications, he did not seem to be taking them. His inner resources had been eroded by life’s dysfunctions and the brutal reality of too many days on the street.
In a 2024 column about Neely and Penny in The New York Times, Emmett Rensin noted that the prevalence of “madness”—“those serious and spectacular forms of mental illness”—on the streets and in the subways “creates a dilemma between two principles of a liberal society: the sovereignty of individuals and the collective right to public order.” When those values can’t be reconciled, the city can feel perilous. I have a desperate desire not to live in a Death Wish version of New York, in which residents take it upon themselves to mete out justice, but what happens when you are caught in a moral pincer without a third party to adjudicate? Had that man on the Q pulled a knife, and had we hurt him before he hurt us, would we have been branded vigilantes?
The worst of those times appear to have passed. Murders and shootings in New York City have plunged in the past few years, and it remains one of the nation’s safest big cities. But statistics comfort only to a point. The continuing presence in public of so many people with seemingly untreated mental illness—including those who still push strangers onto the tracks—is unignorable.
To read Man in the Mirror is to inoculate yourself against the belief that the larger crisis is over. Giridharadas’s book illuminates the conundrum posed by those with Neely’s behavioral profile. On a good day, he could be a gentle busker. He was the Michael Jackson impersonator with a moonwalk step and a sweet smile. But Neely’s mental illness most often went untreated, and it had festered as he evaded caseworkers. He was becoming dangerous. In 2019, he punched someone on a subway platform. Two years later, he slugged a 67-year-old woman as she emerged from a subway station, breaking her nose and fracturing her eye socket; for this, he served a sentence at Rikers Island.
Locking away the Neelys of our cities in Kafkaesque asylums was a more common solution until the 1960s and ’70s; the practice was ultimately rejected for urgent and humane reasons. Yet discerning which mentally ill person poses a threat has not gotten any easier, and letting the most afflicted roam the streets untreated does not constitute a sustainable policy.
Giridharadas writes sensitively about this, and illuminates debates between hopeful public-health officials who yearn to transform society—changing “everything ‘out there’”—and hardheaded pragmatists. The latter group supports a sensible program in New York, now in its early stages, to pair public caseworkers with police officers, marrying the compassion of the former with the practical authority of law enforcement—the better to offer the right kind of help in any situation. There is also an effort to make it easier for families to commit mentally ill relatives for care.
Unfortunately, when Giridharadas moves away from the man who died in the confrontation and the questions that arise from the incident, his analysis grows less subtle. He devotes substantial pages early in his account to the Black activist Al Sharpton without mentioning the extent to which the reverend is a sometimes-unreliable narrator. Sharpton can speak movingly of the lives of the Black forgotten and of those who suffer from police abuse; he also has served as an FBI informant, been on a first-name basis with mobsters, and embraced an outright hoax about a racist conspiracy. And in his politics, he is in some ways an outlier. Many Black New Yorkers, as well as Latinos and Asians, have told pollsters that they favor more, not less, police presence, and that safer subways are an urgent concern. That perspective could have enriched the book.
The author also succumbs in places to class-based stereotypes, particularly when writing of Penny and his family of white suburbanites, people who are unlikely to share his political priors. Such missteps limit rather than expand our understanding of Penny’s background and worldview. Penny grew up in West Islip, on Long Island, a town where, Giridharadas writes, “you had your little yard, your little fence, your little deck, maybe you had your little boat.” He adds that “nothing was beautiful and nothing was ugly.” He casts a cold eye on Penny’s mother, Gina, mocking her working-class accent and writing that she had “so much to express” on Facebook, “but not necessarily the skill or will to express those things in any personal, authentic, or original way.”
The book reaches a crescendo with Penny’s trial. Defense lawyers portrayed a city lost to dysfunction; the police were too late to show up, and only Penny was left to put his life on the line to save “perfect strangers.” The prosecutor—who several times during the trial referred to the former Marine as “the white man” and “the white defendant”—acknowledged what activists and liberal politicians could not: Penny had “started out trying to do the right thing,” until he kept his choke hold in place too long and Neely died. A majority of the jurors were white, but at least four were not. They took 24 hours—not very long, given the case’s complexity—to acquit Penny of criminally negligent homicide.
Afterward, Lander warned that the verdict would “valorize vigilantism.” The left-wing Working Families Party called it a “modern-day lynching.” But all of the jurors rode the subway at least semi-regularly; several had spoken before the trial of their own upsetting experiences on the train, and in the end they appeared disinclined to punish a man who acted to forestall what might have been imminent violence.
It is a virtue of this book that Giridharadas, even while seeming to harbor sympathies for the prosecutors, applies an empathy for New Yorkers who try to thread their way through the divides created by this case. “They shared the sense of being undefended. They shared the sense that the calvary was not coming,” he writes. “They shared a sense that the system was rigged,” and so “shared the sense of their own powerlessness.”
Just hours after the verdict, Penny walked along 30th Street, and people recognized him. “Almost to a person,” Giridharadas notes, “they shook his hand and thanked him.”
It’s tempting to think of this, three years after the incident, as a snapshot of a more turbulent city. But as I finished this essay, I learned of a new horror: Early this month, Erin Piacenti was walking through Times Square, having freshly returned from maternity leave, when Pamela Cisneros, a middle-aged mother of three who appeared lost to madness, fatally stabbed Piacenti in the abdomen. Cisneros, who had suffered decades of mental-health issues, then tried to stab police officers; they shot and killed her. And for Piacenti, the young, innocent woman who lost her life, no one was there to save her.
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