The family of Jordan Neely, a homeless man who died after being held in a chokehold for minutes on a New York subway car in 2023, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against his assailant, Daniel Penny.
The suit accuses Penny of negligent contact, assault, and battery that caused injuries and ultimately death.
The Independent has contacted Penny’s attorneys for comment.
The lawsuit comes two days into jury deliberations in Penny’s ongoing criminal trial for the high-profile incident.
On May 1, 2023, Penny, a former member of the Marine Corps, put Neely in a chokehold for nearly six minutes, after Neely boarded a Manhattan subway train and began shouting aggresively at passengers.
Witnesses described Neely yelling to the subway passengers that he didn’t have food and water and didn’t care if he went to back to jail. Penny, as well as some of his fellow passengers, claimed Neely also said he was willing to kill.
Prosecutors argued in the criminal trial, which began in October, that Penny’s initial attempt to defend his fellow passengers was understandable and “even laudable,” but that the architecture student went too far and used lethal force unnecessarily. They said he continued to hold Neely after some passengers exited the train and Neely stopped moving for nearly a minute.
“You obviously cannot kill someone because they are crazy and ranting and looking menacing, no matter what it is that they are saying,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran told jurors during closing arguments on Monday.
The defense, meanwhile, has argued that other factors could explain Neely’s death, like the man’s use of synthetic marijuana, his schizophrenia, and his genetic predisposition to sickle cell ailments. It has framed Penny’s intervention as a heroic attempt to save his fellow passengers.
“Daniel Penny was the one who moved to protect them,” defense attorney Steven Raiser said during closing arguments. “Why? Because he had something the others didn’t. Something unique to him.”
City medical examiner Dr. Cynthia Harris maintained during her testimony in the trial that Neely died from “compression of the neck.”
During an interview with police, later viewed by jurors, Penny told officers he was “not trying to kill the guy.”
“I just wanted to keep him from getting to people,” Penny told officers.
During the trial, bystanders testified both that they were relieved when Penny grabbed hold of Neely, and that the Marine Corps vet ignored pleas to let the homeless man go.
The case, in which a white man choked a Black man for minutes just a year after the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis, quickly became embroiled in politics over ongoing debates about racism, policing, and public safety.
Critics accused Penny of being a violent vigilante, while conservative commentators praised Penny as a heroic ordinary citizen and raised millions for his legal defense.
