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The timeline put forward by Juan Alberto Vasquez who filmed the incident makes it clear to me that it was the fight (not Neely) that really scared people and that's when they started calling the police. Penny asked them to call the police during the fight when he started being questioned by other passengers about the fight and who he was.
"We stopped at Second Ave., and I saw someone running toward the doors. The door was just about to close — three, five inches away from closing — when Jordan stuck his hand between them. Can you believe that? The irony. The irony that [...] if he’d gotten there a single second later, the door would have closed and he wouldn’t have gotten in.
But he stopped the door from closing and he got on the train. And he stood in the middle of the train car, and then he started yelling that he didn’t have food, that he didn’t have water. From what I understood, he was yelling that he was tired, that he didn’t care about going to jail.
[...]
And then I heard him take off his jacket. He bundled it up and just threw it on the floor, very violently. You could hear the sound of the zipper hitting the floor. At that moment, when he threw the jacket, the people who were sitting around him stood up and moved away. He kept standing there and he kept yelling.
It’s at that moment that this man came up behind him and grabbed him by the neck, and I think — I didn’t see, but I think — that move of grabbing him by the neck also led him to grab Neely by the legs with his own. They both fell. And then in like 30 seconds, I don’t know, we got to Broadway-Lafayette, and they were just there on the floor. You ask how many people out of 100 would have dared to do something like that, and I think that 98 will say: “No, I would wait to see one more sign that indicates aggression.”
When the two doors opened, everyone rushed out, obviously afraid, because now there was an actual fight. I got out, and I was watching them on the floor with this other man helping to hold Neely down. And then there’s just this confusion over what to do, all these people standing around on the platform, and some of them were yelling, “Call the police, call the police.” There were a couple of people who approached the blond guy, they say he’s a marine, and asked him, “What’s going on?” And he told them to call the police.
Obviously, the conductor had no idea what was going on. He was just going to close the doors and keep going. But there were people who stood between the doors and said, “No! Don’t close the doors!” I went over to the conductor too, and he was saying over the speaker, “Police, police!” But obviously there weren’t any police in the station. So I went back to where the scene was. And that’s when I started to film.
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‘I Wasn’t Thinking That Anybody Was Going to Die.’
Speaking with Juan Alberto Vasquez, the passenger who recorded the video of Jordan Neely on the F trainwww.curbed.com
I read it the same way. People moved out of the car, got off the train, dialed 911 (etc) only after they saw two men grappling on the floor of the car. I was surprised that the train was already stopped at a platform during much of this and that there was a conductor present (who was apparently trying to get the train going again? not sure). Police arrive soon after Penny appears to leave the immediate vicinity of the victim (I don't think he fled or anything, he just goes out of frame in the video).
So, it will be up to a NYC jury to decide whether this was a reasonable response. If this man is correct (and he probably is), many NYers might feel the same way.
IMO.