Needless, Heated Rhetoric Ensures N.Y. Subway Crime Escalates
In the wake of Daniel Penny’s not guilty verdict, which a Manhattan jury reached on Dec. 9, 2024, New Yorkers relying on the subway can relate, experiencing what's now dispiritingly called "The Daniel Penny Effect."
In May 2023, Penny, now 26, was arrested and charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for having defended himself and other subway passengers against Jordan Neely, a homeless drug addict with 42 prior arrests — inclusive of three for subway assaults.
Witnesses testified that Neely was threatening them. He subsequently died.
For 17 months, Penny’s fate hung in the balance as Manhattan’s radical left legal apparatus prosecuted him as "the white man" whose actions, they claimed, resulted in the death of a Black man.
When Penny was acquitted, racialist activists directed potentially threatening language toward him in the courtroom with no apparent consequences, while multiple Democratic politicians publicly decried his not guilty verdict.
On Jan. 4, President Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — on George Soros, who has funded the campaigns of dozens of left-wing prosecutors, including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Bragg's office prosecuted Penny.
Over the last 10 days of 2024, New York found out that virtually no one will take the same risk as Daniel Penny.
On Dec. 22, 57-year old Debrina Kawam, was set on fire and burned beyond recognition on a Brooklyn F train.
The incident, which occurred at 7:30 on a Sunday morning, was widely witnessed and filmed in real time by bystanders who neither intervened to prevent the attack nor put out the flames that engulfed Kawam, who was later identified by an analysis of her seared fingerprints.
The alleged attacker, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, is an illegal immigrant who was deported during the first Trump administration but reentered the country under Joe Biden.
Two days later, on Christmas Eve, a suspect later identified as Jason Sargeant allegedly attacked a 42-year old man, and 26-year old woman in Grand Central Station’s subway terminal in separate and unprovoked attacks, after activating the emergency brake on a northbound five-line subway, and leaving the train.
Witnesses claimed to have seen Sargeant randomly yelling at people as he wandered through the subway station, but none intervened to stop him, or help the victims, who were left to their own devices to summon aid.
Imani-Ciara Pizarro, the female victim, later recounted onlooking bystanders "just froze" as she was punched in the back of the head, knocked to the floor, and slashed in the throat.
Sargeant was later apprehended by the police when they coincidentally observed him entering the aboveground train station in the same mental state and stopped him.
On Dec. 31, suspected assailant Kamel Hawkins, 23, allegedly pushed 45-year old Joseph Lynskey, in front of a 1-line subway at the 18th Street station, in the heart of Manhattan’s once-posh Chelsea neighborhood.
Lynskey was severely injured but miraculously survived the assault, which was also captured in a harrowing video.
Yet again, there is no report of anyone intervening to prevent an attack that could just as easily have resulted in his horrible death.
Hawkins has a prior arrest for assaulting a New York City police officer and has an open criminal case for assault, harassment, and illegal weapons possession resulting from an October 2024 incident.
While these three easily preventable crimes demonstrate a clear pattern, they are only a handful of dozens of felony assaults reported on New York’s subway since Dec. 1, 2024.
Their swelling number, which may rise further as New York City’s new congestion pricing system for vehicles drives more people onto the subway, marks a 40% increase over attacks in December 2023.
This is despite Mayor Eric Adams’s promise to "flood" the transportation network with 1,000 police officers, the deployment of 1,000 National Guard troops by Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., to augment NYPD efforts, and gaslighting claims from these and other incompetent Democratic politicians that crime in the city is down.
After Daniel Penny’s trial, in which the process was the punishment, it's unsurprising that New Yorkers are reluctant to take any action that could result in their own arrest and prosecution, even if it would save lives, prevent serious harm, make their city safer, or ultimately be vindicated in court despite the most determined efforts of the radical left controlling the Manhattan’s District Attorney's office.
Those officials will continue to preside over this lamentable state of anarcho-tyranny until New Yorkers finally find the courage to turn them out of office and restore their once-great city to the high standards of safety its people and visitors deserve.
Or they could move to Florida, where our free state’s stand your ground laws will protect them — and do so absent any state and municipal income taxes.
(A related article may be found here, and here.)
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University. Read more — Here.
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