Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has come under fire from Mayor Eric Adams for jumping to the conclusion that Jordan Neely was “murdered” when a Marine put him in a chokehold.
Hizzoner slammed the progressive lawmaker as well as City Comptroller Brad Lander for saying that people are celebrating the problematic 30-year-old homeless guy being “choked to death by a vigilante without consequence.”
“I don’t think that’s very responsible at this point in the investigation,” Adams said on CNN Primetime late Wednesday when questioned about the two inflammatory tweets.
Adam said that they should let the DA conduct the investigation without anyone interfering.
“I’m going to be responsible and let them do their job and figure out exactly what happened here,” the mayor said emphatically.
Landers tweeted that “NYC is not Gotham” – since “the comptroller is a city-wide leader,” as Adams pointed out.
“We don’t know exactly what happened here,” Adams said of Monday’s fatal chokehold aboard a F train in downtown Manhattan.
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When asked when it is “appropriate” for train riders to “take matters into [their] own hands,” Adams noted that “every situation is different.”
“I was a former transit police officer who responded to many calls where a passenger was assisting someone. As a result, we cannot tell what a passenger should or should not do in such a case.”
Neely’s death was judged a homicide by the municipal medical examiner on Wednesday due to “compression of neck (chokehold).”
Witnesses claim that Neely was experiencing a mental breakdown when a second straphanger, a 24-year-old Marine from Queens, tackled him from behind and choked him for around 15 minutes.
Nevertheless, Adams emphasized that “so many unknowns at this time.”
Adams had just finished speaking when Landers responded with a screenshot of the definition of “vigilantism” from a dictionary: “law enforcement conducted by a self-appointed group of people without legal authority.”
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Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez criticized Adams’ earlier statement regarding the “tragic” death, in which he once more stated there was “a lot we don’t know about what happened.”
“This honestly feels like a new low: not being able to clearly condemn a public murder because the victim was of a social status some would deem ‘too low’ to care about,” AOC tweeted.
Considering that his administration is “trying to cut the very services that could have helped” Neely, further claimed that Adams is being “especially rich” in his demands for increased assistance for those in need.
After the fatal confrontation, the Marine was taken to prison and then released without being charged.
Attorneys have the option of presenting the matter to a grand jury, which will then determine whether to pursue charges.
Neely was the man who was pinned down in a terrifying video by a straphanger. Neely was a 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator.
According to Newsweek, a spokesperson for the New York Police Department, Neely has been arrested 42 times between 2013 and 2021. Four of them are related to assault, and others are related to transit fraud and criminal trespass. Neely had one outstanding warrant for assault from a 2021 incident at the time of his death.
According to the spokeswoman, Neely was arrested for minor infractions of local law, such as having an open container of alcohol in public, which result in many of these arrests.
