Mayor Adams rips AOC for saying Jordan Neely was ‘murdered’
Mayor Eric Adams has ripped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for rushing to conclude that Jordan Neely was “murdered” when he was put in a chokehold by a Marine.
Hizzoner criticized the progressive lawmaker along with City Comptroller Brad Lander, who claimed people are cheering how the troubled 30-year-old homeless man was “choked to death by a vigilante without consequence.”
“I don’t think that’s very responsible at the time where we are still investigating the situation,” Adams said on “CNN Primetime” late Wednesday when asked about both inflammatory tweets.
“Let’s let the DA conduct his investigation with the law enforcement officials. To really interfere with that is not the right thing to do.
“I’m going to be responsible and allow them to do their job and allow them to determine exactly what happened here,” the mayor stressed.
The rush to conclusions was particularly irresponsible from Landers — who started his tweet by saying that “NYC is not Gotham” — because “the comptroller’s a city-wide leader,” noted Adams.
“We don’t know exactly what happened here,” Adams stressed of the fatal chokehold on an F train in lower Manhattan Monday afternoon.
Asked when it is “appropriate” for subway passengers to “take matters into [their] own hands,” Adams stressed: “Each situation is different.
“I was a former transit police officer, and I responded to many jobs where you had a passenger assisting someone. And so we cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that.”
The city medical examiner ruled Wednesday that Neely’s death was a homicide due to “compression of neck (chokehold).”
Witnesses say that Neely was having a mental episode when another straphanger, identified as a 24-year-old Marine from Queens, took him down from behind and placed him in a chokehold for about 15 minutes.
Still, Adams stressed that there are “so many unknowns at this time.”
“And now it’s in the hands of investigators to determine exactly what happened … We should allow the investigation to take his course.”
Soon after Adams spoke, Landers replied with a screenshot of a dictionary definition of “vigilantism” as “law enforcement undertaken without legal authority by a self-appointed group of people.”
Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, attacked an earlier message from Adams about the “tragic” death, in which he again noted 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,” the lawmaker wrote.
She also accused Adams of being ” especially rich” in calling for more care for those in need given that his administration is “trying to cut the very services that could have helped” Neely.
The Marine was taken into custody after the deadly encounter and then released without criminal charges. Prosecutors can opt to present the case to a grand jury and let them decide if charges should be filed
He declined to comment when reached by The Post on Tuesday.
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