NYC NOW - October 22, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is eliminating an online form that has frustrated some city council members for months. WNYC’s Giulia Heyward reports. Meanwhile, police are investigating a 7-car crash at the intersection of Ocean Parkway and Avenue V in Brooklyn that left 16 people injured on Monday. Also, the Whitney Museum will offer free admission to visitors who are 25 years old and younger starting in mid-December. Plus, jury selection is underway in the trial of Daniel Penny, the former Marine accused of fatally choking Jordan Neely, an unhoused man, on a subway last year. WNYC’s Samantha Max has the latest.

Welcome to NYC now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Tuesday, October 22nd. Here's the midday news from Alec Hamilton. Mayor Eric Adams is scrapping an online form that some city council members say was a source of frustration for months. WNYC's Julia Hayward reports. City officials will no longer need to complete a lengthy online online. form to communicate with the mayor or his administration.

The form was introduced in April and drew sharp criticism from elected leaders. It even prompted a Brooklyn City Council member to propose a bill aimed at eliminating it. That legislation had a veto-proof majority and pressured City Hall to drop the requirement. A City Hall spokesperson says they wanted to avoid the bill's passage to prevent costly taxpayer-funded litigation. Officials will still need to fill out a different form for two. direct meetings with Mayor Adams. Police are looking into the cause of a seven-car crash in Brooklyn yesterday. It happened at the intersection of Ocean Parkway and Avenue V in Gravesend just after noon.

Police say a car with two 554-year-old women inside rear-ended the car in front of them, causing a chain reaction where six other cars were hit. At least one vehicle landed in the bike path along Ocean Parkway. Sixteen people were taken to local hospitals with minor injuries. And the Whitney Museum will be free for all visitors 25 and younger starting in mid-December. It has already been free for visitors 18 and younger for more than a decade, and this year it also started offering free admission on Friday evenings and second Sundays. A spokesperson says the free programs have more than doubled the museum's average attendance.

That's dropped to the average age of visitors by 10 years, and roughly doubled the share of visitors who are people of color. Sunny today with a high near 81, it's W. NYC. Stay close. There's more after the break. NYC. Jury selection is underway in the trial of Daniel Penny.

He's the former Marine who choked a man to death on the subway last year. My colleague Sean Carlson spoke with WNYC's Samantha Max, who's been covering the case. Sam, it's been a year and a half since this case started. Can you just remind us what happened? Yeah. So in May 2023, Daniel Penny was on an up. downtown F train after class in Brooklyn on his way to the gym, when a man gets on its second avenue in the Lower East Side starts yelling, according to witnesses. We now know that man

was Jordan Neely. There are conflicting accounts about what happened between the Second Avenue stop and the Broadway Lafayette stop. But we do know from various different witnesses is that Neely was yelling about being hungry and thirsty, saying something along the lines of he was ready to die or go to jail. And then Penny puts him in a chokehold, takes him to the ground, and continues to squeeze Neely's neck for about six minutes. Neely ended up dying. Penny talked to police that day, but he wasn't immediately charged with a crime that led to protests. And then about a week and a half later, Penny was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide and pleaded not guilty.

What do we know about Daniel Penny? So we know that he was a student at the time. He was a former Marine in his mid-20s from Long Island, but had been living in New York City. He gave an interview to the New York Post. He also recorded this short video after he was charged, kind of explaining his perspective. But there's really still a lot that we don't know about him. One main thing that we do know is that he maintains that he didn't mean to hurt Neely and he was just trying to protect fellow subway riders. What do we know about Neely? So Neely was a former Michael Jackson impersonator. You can find videos of him online. He was really beloved by people who had seen him dance. Based on news reports, we know that his mom was actually strangled to death when he was a teenager and he testified at her trial. Love ones have said that he never really recovered from that. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, cycled in and out of treatment for years. Court records show that he also used a drug called K2. He had been arrested in the past. But loved ones and family and friends, you know, they used to love watching him perform, said he was a wonderful person.

And we just don't know exactly what was happening with him on the subway that day. Yeah. Now, this case has been kind of a lightning rod, right? Because it highlights some pretty stark divides between New Yorkers about things like subway safety, mental health, homelessness. How do you expect those divides to come up as the prosecution and the defense for that matter each argued their version of what happened on the train that day? Yeah. So I think the prosecution is going to be focusing. pretty narrowly on just those few minutes of the two of them interacting on the train,

Penny putting Neely in a chokehold and moment-by-moment decisions of him continuing to hold that chokehold. Meanwhile, the defense, they're going to be focusing more broadly on fears on the subway, you know, on this kind of rhetoric around subway safety. They're going to try to relate to jurors and get them to feel the fear that they're saying that Penny and others on the subway experience that day. What happens next here, Sam? So the trial is expected to last about six weeks. I stopped by.

There were people crowded into the hallway on the 13th floor holding sheets of paper. These were all these prospective jurors that are being called. Because this is such a high profile case, there's a lot of attention to protecting the identities of potential jurors. So there was a very strict, no photo taking policy in the hallway. All these reporters crowded into cage. kind of just watching things play out. I saw Jordan Neely's dad outside the courtroom, speaking with the lead prosecutor in the case. And this is kind of what we can expect for the next few days as they

go through jury selection, which is going to be a difficult process just because so many people in the city know about what happened. But once they get through all of that, there will be opening statements. And then we get into the trial. There will be lots of witnesses called people who on the subway that day, police who responded, psychiatric experts, military training experts, and then the jury will have to deliberate and decide what they think is the right, you know, convict or not convict. Samatha Max covers public safety and the courts for WNYC. You can read more of her reporting on the penny case on our news website, Gothamist.

Sam, thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Be sure to catch us every week. weekday, three times a day for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you this evening.