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After Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely with a chokehold on May 1, several local media outlets reported that Neely had thrown trash at subway passengers, aggressively threatened them and got into an argument with Penny before Penny tackled him to the ground.
But within a few days, as reporting relied less on anonymous law enforcement sources, journalists began poking holes in each of these details, and outright contradicted some of them.
By that time, though, the two men involved in the incident had been painted with broad brushes. Penny, a 24-year-old white man, was written not as someone who’d used a deadly martial arts position for several minutes straight, but rather as a Marine veteran looking for work as a bartender in New York. Neely, on the other hand, was a Black, homeless, mentally ill former Michael Jackson impersonator ― an “unhinged” “vagrant,” as the New York Post described him ― whose killing recalled an era “when residents felt besieged by crime,” as The Associated Press put it.
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