Alethea Gittings was yelled at, stood up and sexually assaulted on a New York City subway. She said in a Manhattan courtroom on Friday that those events angered her.
But when Jordan Neely boarded her uptown F train and started screaming on May 1, 2023, Gettings wasn’t angry. She was afraid.
“When he came in, he was unbelievably off the charts,” Gittings told police at the Broadway Lafayette Street station that day, according to body camera footage played in court. “He scared the living daylights out of everyone.”
Gittings was one of several New Yorkers on the subway with Neely who stood as a witness this week in the criminal trial of Daniel Penny, a former Marine accused of Neely’s murder. As Neely screamed at the passengers, Benny wrapped his arm around Neely, pulled him to the floor of the train car and kept him in a chokehold for approximately six minutes.
Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator who was homeless at the time, was pronounced dead shortly after. Penny has pleaded not guilty to charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.
A cellphone video recording several minutes of havoc on the F train went viral and touched on politically charged debates about subway safety, homelessness and mental illness. Some have wondered if race played a role in Benny’s actions, since he is white and Indigo is black. Supporters called Benny a hero and donated more than $3 million to the legal defense fund. Advocates for homeless New Yorkers flocked to the Broadway-Lafayette Street station to protest Nellie’s death and pressure prosecutors to bring criminal charges against Penny.
Like Gittings, several passengers told jurors they had witnessed other outbursts on the train before. But as they described their May 2023 subway ride with Nellie and Benny, witness after witness said this eruption was different.
“This was just another kind of volume. The desperation in his voice, the anger, the aggression,” Dan Couvreur said as he described Neely’s behavior on the train.
“I was so terrified,” he added. “My heart was pounding.”
Lori Citro, a native New Yorker who has ridden the subway for 30 years, said she was on her way uptown with her 5-year-old when Neely boarded their train and started “screaming in people’s faces” that he didn’t have water. , and I didn’t have food, and I didn’t have a home, and he wanted to hurt people and go to Rikers Island prison. She described Nellie as “hostile.”
“It was very erratic and unpredictable,” she said.
Citro told jurors she pushed a stroller in front of her son to protect him.
“It’s not like you can take a 5-year-old and run to the next train. Five-year-olds don’t move very fast,” she said. “I was very relieved when Daniel Penny stopped him from moving.”
Binnie’s attorney, Thomas Kenniff, seized on the moment in his opening statement last week, telling jurors that Binnie put Neeley in a chokehold after seeing Neeley move toward the mother and child and say, “I’m going to kill.”
But on the witness stand Friday, Citro didn’t remember it happening that way.
“Did Mr. Neely lunge at you and say, ‘I’m going to kill you?'” Assistant District Attorney Gillian Chartrand asked.
“No, he didn’t,” Citro replied. She said that although she felt unsafe, she never heard Neely say those words or lunge directly at her.
The former Marine put Neely in a chokehold not to kill him but to restrain him, because he and other subway riders were afraid, Binney and his attorneys said. Some of the witnesses who took the stand said they felt nervous, afraid, or even terrified.
Juan Alberto Vazquez, a freelance journalist who recorded the video that went viral, told the jury he was thinking about a 2022 mass shooting on the N train that he had reported on. He and several other passengers said they feared Neely was armed.
It turns out that this is not true. But Vasquez said he shouted for someone to call the police because one passenger was screaming violently and one man began grabbing another.
“This was not a normal scene,” Vazquez said through a Spanish translator.
Other witnesses said it was Penny who acted inappropriately.
Larry Goodson said Penny “jumped” at Nellie “very quickly” while Nellie was not in a threatening position “at all”. He said that when the train arrived at the station, he tried to convince Benny to let Nellie out of the choke hold. He had been talking on the phone with his fiancée, who served in the military, and was worried that Nellie might die.
“Mr. Penny did not respond,” Goodson said.
This story has been updated with additional information.
