The New York City Subway Is a Madhouse. And a Miracle.

On Jordan Neely, Daniel Penny, Debrina Kawam, and a system of signal failures

Photo by Arthur Hutterer on Unsplash

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I travel frequently between Los Angeles and New York City, often taking a redeye flight into JFK. The final leg of this journey is nearly always the subway, specifically the A train, which runs the longest subway route in the city, spanning 31 miles from Far Rockaway in Queens to 207th Street in the upper tip of Manhattan. I take it almost the whole way, boarding in the pre-dawn darkness at the Howard Beach station, which connects to the airport light rail, and emerging an hour or so later into the bright morning light of north Harlem. Along the route, construction workers and other tradespeople travel to job sites, sleepy students commute to school, and women in colorful medical scrubs make their way to clinics and hospitals.

All the while, men and sometimes women sleep on the seats in cradles of filth. Wrapped in some combination of blankets, torn clothing, and garbage bags, they either sit upright, nodding off at intervals, or appear to be passed out cold across entire rows of seats. We fellow passengers grant them a wide berth, less out of respect for privacy than in avoidance of the inevitable stench.

The homeless on the subways make mouth breathers of us all. They also make monsters of us all. But interaction can feel like an insult. The only thing crueler than ignoring them is subjecting them to an interrogation as to their well-being, which just adds insult to inhumanity. Are you okay?

What kind of question is that? Even the cops frequently look the other way. If I’m carrying leftover restaurant food I sometimes leave it on a bench on the subway platform, hoping whoever encounters it still has an appetite buried somewhere inside the malaise, but the gesture seems quaint to the point of foolishness.

The number of people living on the streets in New York City is the highest it has been in two decades, and is believed to be grossly undercounted in any case. A small percentage of these people are unstable to the point of psychosis and violence. Last year, there were 10 murders on the subway and at least 25 incidents of people being pushed onto the tracks. Police statistics showed that in December there were 48 felony assaults on city transit, and in the last week alone, five people, including a transit worker, were slashed or stabbed on the subway. On New Year’s Eve, a man was pushed onto the tracks by a random assailant while waiting for the 1 train at 18th Street.

On December 22, the same day as a stabbing on a Queens train, a ghastly incident occurred in Brooklyn. A woman asleep on a train parked at the last stop on the F line was set on fire by a man who proceeded to sit on a bench outside the open door of the train car and watch her burn. By the time she awoke, she was engulfed in flames and could only stand motionless. Video shows her assailant fanning the flames and a police officer arriving at the scene and calling for backup rather than coming to her aid. Passersby appear to be gawking or doing nothing.

We should know not to trust video by now. There’s no telling what was going on outside the camera frame. (Know-it-alls on social media insisted that the platform was packed with callous commuters who did nothing, but the incident occurred early on a Sunday morning in an area where the homeless frequently sleep on the parked train or in the station.) Still, even a moment’s glimpse tells a story horrific beyond imagining. The victim, who was pronounced dead at the scene, would eventually be identified as Debrina Kawam, a 57-year-old from New Jersey who had once been a high school cheerleader and even attended college before apparently spiraling into addiction and other troubles. The assailant was a 33-year-old undocumented Guatemalan who’d returned to the U.S. after being deported in 2018 and whose last address was a public shelter designated for men with substance and psychological problems.

All of it has played out in the aftermath of the December 9 acquittal of Daniel Penny, an architecture student and ex-Marine who was charged with second-degree manslaughter in the 2023 death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man who was terrorizing passengers on a subway car until Penny subdued him with a chokehold during which Neely became unconscious and was later pronounced dead. The jury deadlocked over the manslaughter charge and later acquitted Penny on a lesser charge. Despite activist hand-wringing, the outcome appeared to be welcomed or at least accepted by most New Yorkers.

Still, if your chief connection to New York City is reading certain New York Times headlines (or, god help you, certain tripe-like remnants of blogospheric opinion), you might think that Penny’s only supporters were right-wing activists and that Neely was simply a troubled “former Michael Jackson impersonator” who was “yelling about his hunger.” That’s not anything close to the whole story. Neely, who was 30 at the time and whose 42 previous arrests included assaulting three women, including a 67-year-old outside a subway, was well known to riders as someone whose psychosis was extreme by any standard. Witnesses testified that Neely had screamed, “Someone is going to die today,” and “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison.”

It so happens that one of my neighbors, a lifelong New Yorker who isn’t afraid of much, had been in a subway car with Neely just a week before his death and said she’d been so terrified that she was still shaking when she got back to her apartment.

The people I know in New York are hardly right-wing. Many still carry their trusty NPR tote bags and vote for Democratic leaders out of pure muscle reflex. Still, nearly everyone I’ve spoken with about the case expressed relief at Penny’s acquittal. Not because Penny was entirely blameless (though he clearly had no intent to kill Neely, the chokehold appeared to have lasted longer than necessary) but because a conviction would have effectively cut off all possibility for Good Samaritan intervention on the subways. That he was even indicted is enough to make someone think twice about stepping in. And given the police shortage in the city, relying on the kindness—and brute strength—of strangers is becoming more necessary every day.

But that’s the thing about New York. The strangers are kind. Or at least they can be when they want to be. On my most recent early-morning subway ride from JFK, a woman tending to a sick passenger alerted the conductor and delayed the train by at least 20 minutes while police and paramedics were summoned. That’s why I’m so frustrated by the cascade of social media comments about how New York is a hellhole and anyone foolish enough to live there effectively deserves what’s coming to him. Most of these comments bear the hallmarks of people who’ve never set foot inside the city, let alone lived there or ridden the subway.

But many of those decrying Penny as a racist vigilante seem not to have spent much time on the subway lately either. If they had, they would know that finding yourself trapped in a crowded space with a person experiencing full-blown hallucinatory derangement, likely layered with alcohol and dangerous drugs, is a routine occurrence. The fact that people are allowed to live in such barbaric conditions if they refuse shelter and treatment is already a stain on cities like New York. (Under decades-old right-to-shelter policies, which have been slightly amended in the wake of the migrant crisis, the city is legally obligated to provide temporary housing to anyone requesting it. Still, many refuse it.) That the barbaric conditions would threaten the lives not only of those experiencing them but potentially anyone who comes into contact with them is the mark of a failed state.

On this latest trip, I had an early-morning flight back to Los Angeles. I debated whether to take the subway to JFK (an $11.40 fare, including the AirTrain to the terminal) or a taxi or Uber, which would have cost upward of $100. Boarding the subway at 4 a.m. for an hourlong ride seemed like a bit of a gamble, but thriftiness won out. I dragged myself and my suitcase into the freezing night and down into the station, crossing my fingers that everything would be okay.

Everything was okay, though that’s not to say the trip was uneventful. There were a handful of regular riders on their way to who-knows-where, but also plenty of vagrants either sleeping on the seats or wandering zombie-like through the cars. At one point, a shoeless man shuffled past, halfheartedly shaking a cup full of coins. His pants had fallen below his knees, revealing skin lesions on his legs and bare feet. A man sitting near me shook his head and waved him off, saying Get out of here, man. We made eye contact and he said something about the sorry state of things. We then struck up a conversation that I was happy to keep going for several stops, since in addition to being quite affable, the man was quite large and appeared to be someone who might offer protection if the need arose. He explained that he was originally from the Caribbean, where “shit like this would not be tolerated.”

About halfway through the trip, a man entered the car ranting and flailing. After surveying the other passengers, he stopped in front of me and leaned in close to my face, shouting something nonsensical that I could only interpret as a demand that I acknowledge his presence. Since that’s precisely what you should not do, I avoided his gaze for what felt like an eternity, even though it was probably just a few seconds. After he’d moved on and I resumed chatting with my Caribbean friend, a very young man who was clearly strung out on something boarded the train and proceeded to fixate on our conversation. To my dismay, my new pal got off a few stops later, fist-bumping me on his way out.

Yo, baby, I’m a cool guy too, the strung-out guy said. Why don’t you talk to me? You too good for me?

I did that thing that women learn to do with importuning men. I delivered a quick smile and looked away. I then pulled out my phone and pretended to do something with it, keeping it as close to my body as possible. I recalled a subway incident I’d experienced years before, a bizarre little scene in which two men sitting across from me had apologized on behalf of the male species after an unhinged panhandler got in my face and yelled, “Bitch!” at the top of his lungs. I’d told them I just tended to have that effect on people. This had struck me as very funny, though I don’t recall them laughing.

I got to the airport in just over an hour and for at least $90 less than an Uber would have cost. It was still dark when the train pulled up to the Howard Beach station platform, and something about the cold December air and the distant airport lights made me smile.

The New York City subway operates every hour of every day and includes 472 stations along 25 routes across 665 miles of track. Since the first time I rode it, probably sometime in the 1980s as a teenager, I’ve always thought the whole system was a kind of miracle. Back then, the trains were wallpapered with graffiti and crime was so bad that a citizens safety patrol group called the Guardian Angels had emerged to help protect passengers from things like armed robbery. (The Angels have recently redeployed and are working alongside the National Guard and a mayor-ordered “surge” of police officers in the subway, apparently to minimal effect.) The trains were always breaking down and stopping between stations with no explanation. In my memory, the local news was constantly reporting on the dragging deaths of people who’d tried to jump on the train as the doors were closing, including mothers with strollers. To this day, I wince when I see someone do that.

But even at its worst, the subway always felt like the place to be. Being on the subway meant you were going somewhere in New York and therefore going somewhere in life. It amazes me today when I hear about people who’ve lived in the city for years yet rarely if ever take the subway. It’s like living in Los Angeles and not driving on the freeway.

New York City is not enjoying its finest hour, not by a long shot. As relieved as I am that Daniel Penny was acquitted, I am sickened by the circumstances that caused Jordan Neely to wind up in Penny’s hands and that caused all those people to be slashed, stabbed and shoved this past week. As for Debrina Kawam, what happened to her goes beyond sickening into something that defies words.

But I still think the New York City subway is a miracle. To endure all of this, it would have to be.