Ex-Marine strangles Michael Jackson impersonator on New York subway

Police officers try to revive the victim, this Monday in a subway car in New York. Paul Martinka (AP)

The American reality does not stop providing movie plots despite the strike of the Hollywood scriptwriters.

New York, that great set where eight million extras swarm daily, is the scene of many -and often sad- stories that combine the frenzy of their dreams and the reality of their worst nightmares.

What happened this Monday in the city subway, a frequent scene in the horror genre, brings together several ingredients that often season the plot of unforgettable movies or rude B-series TV movies: the deceitful shine of fame, the lace of veterans in civilian life, the impact of mental illness and violence, always violence, as a response to problems.

All this concentrated in a subway car in Manhattan, where reality, as the old adage says,

Jordan Neely, a well-known Michael Jackson impersonator who had taken to the streets with mental illness, was strangled to death by a former Marine after a confrontation caught on camera as the train approached the Broadway-Lafayette station in NoHo.

Face to face, in an unequal duel, a poor devil, blinded by the light of fame like a moth by light, and a vigilante who tried to abort, with fatal consequences, the madness that pushed the former to scream and throw garbage at wagon passengers.

New York subway users are scared, but the violence with which the 24-year-old veteran responded to the excesses of Neely, 30, surpassed even what is known.

The ex-soldier suffocated the victim in an attempt to immobilize her, despite being completely harmless, according to his family and friends.

Neely was a familiar image in Times Square, the city's kilometer zero, where dozens of impersonators and human dolls of Disney and Marvel characters gather daily to take photos with tourists.

The few extant images of Neely show him dressed in Jackson's usual button-up jackets and skinny pants, to whom he bears a strong resemblance.

Friends and elected officials in the city have condemned Neely's senseless death.

“New York is not Gotham,” Comptroller (City Comptroller) Brad Lander tweeted.

“We must not become a city where a mental patient can be suffocated to death by a vigilante without consequences.

Or where the murderer is justified and cheered, ”he added, referring to the attitude of the rest of the travelers before the event.

Gotham is the city of the superhero Batman, and one of the names by which New York has been known since 1807, when the writer Washington Irving, the author of

, he baptized it that way in another work.

"The home of auction fools", etymologically, a sinister cross between Joker and Batman.

The perfect plot for a good or bad movie: social rejection, marginalization and a series of tragic events, the world of crime through the path of madness.

Neely was on an F line train when it began acting erratically early Monday afternoon, passengers told police.

He yelled and threw trash around the wagon, sparking an argument with the veteran.

The difference turned into a fight as the train pulled into the station.

A man helped the ex-Marine to immobilize Neely, who he kept kicking for two minutes until he stopped moving, unconscious, with Neely's left arm around his neck.

The impersonator was taken to a hospital alive, where he died.

The aspiring artist was an old acquaintance of the police, with a history of mental disorder, more than 40 arrests for sneaking without a ticket or disturbing public order and pending an investigation for an assault in 2021. He was one of the thousands of patients untreated, although many times diagnosed, mental disorders that have made the city subway and its streets their home, a scandalous phenomenon for what is presented as the capital of the world to which the municipal authorities have not yet found a solution: their politics about it is a succession of hesitations.

According to his friends, he was hungry when he was the protagonist of the incident, one more, not very different, from those that the long-suffering New York subway travelers witness daily.

Rafael Shimunov, co-host of a program on local radio station WBAI,

“(He was) a starving New Yorker choked to death by a grinning Marine who is being celebrated as a hero by the NYPD and the press,” Shimunov tweeted, quoted by the Daily

.

Indeed, the veteran Marine was briefly detained for questioning and released without charge.

A vigilante in possession of truth and strength, facing a harmless clown with a personal history of heartbreak: at the age of 18, he violently lost his 36-year-old mother, whose body was discovered in a suitcase thrown on the side of a street. Bronx Highway.

She had also been strangled.

Her boyfriend was sentenced to 30 years in jail for the crime.

Police and the Manhattan prosecutor's office are awaiting the results of the autopsy, which will be released this Wednesday, to determine whether to file criminal charges against the young veteran.

The video of the deadly incident, meanwhile, surfs through social networks, another notch in the imagination where reality and fiction are confused.