Christopher Neely would drive for miles around Manhattan searching for his nephew, Jordan Neely, scanning bus stops and subway stations.
Jordan Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator with a history of mental illness, was homeless and adrift. His mother’s brother longed to offer him food, shelter or just a chance to freshen up. One day, Christopher Neely ran into Jordan on the subway. The younger man ran in the opposite direction.
“He has a place to stay but he doesn’t want to come home,” Christopher Neely told reporters. “That’s something my nephew told me.”
Only in death have Jordan Neely’s uncle and the rest of his family caught up with him. For five weeks, relatives and supporters have shown up daily at the manslaughter trial of Daniel Penny, a former Marine who choked Mr. Neely to death on an F train last year after he frightened passengers.
Christopher Neely and Andre Zachery, the victim’s father, have had to watch that moment, captured in harrowing video footage, over and over as Mr. Neely’s final struggles have been dissected. Mr. Zachery has often left the room rather than watch his son die onscreen yet again.
Their experience is a nightmare version of what thousands of families in New York City grapple with every day.
In New York, public hospitals are overwhelmed by almost 50,000 psychiatric patients each year, and the shelter system has failed to place many of them in dedicated mental health facilities. The toll reaches beyond the individual — networks of relatives and friends like Mr. Neely’s are often confused and at a loss for how to help. Mr. Neely himself was on a “Top 50” roster of New Yorkers who have a history of resisting help despite the most dire need.
“We have an individual that doesn’t trust the system,” said Dr. Zachary Blumkin, a psychologist and senior clinical director at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. At the same time, “we have a family that’s lost,” he added. “The family members are often not thought about, not seen and suffering many times without support, both social and from the system.”
During the trial, in which lawyers will make closing arguments Monday, records in evidence showed that Mr. Neely, 30, had logged more than a dozen hospital stays across the city over six years. At one point, he showed up at Metropolitan Hospital Center in East Harlem disheveled and desperate for psychiatric medication, with the synthetic marijuana he habitually abused in his system.
Now, his family, unable to get Mr. Neely the consistent help he needed during his life, is watching the consequences play out within the four walls of a 13th-floor Manhattan courtroom with peeling paint and cracked plaster.
A revolving group of family members comes each day, largely cordoned off by activists and members of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. Christopher Neely and Mr. Zachery are the constants.
The brothers-in-law never enter or exit together. Mr. Zachery, a wiry man often dressed in a windbreaker and black baseball cap, lopes to the third row, sometimes accompanied by one of the family’s lawyers. Christopher Neely sits in a largely empty row behind him. He dresses conspicuously: a velvet embroidered cape, a feathered fedora, a tan trench coat. The men rarely speak to each other.
Mental illness is taxing to families, according to Elliott Madison, chief program officer at Fountain House, one of the mental health nonprofits in New York that offer services and community support. The emotional fallout of severe mental illness creates a “wilderness,” he said, adding, “It causes stress inside the family, not just with the individual that’s having the crisis.”
Psychiatric problems create unique cracks and strains in familial bonds, Dr. Blumkin said. Families may sense a lingering stigma and look for help from a system that is “not only complex, but overwhelmed.”
While Mr. Neely’s family members and supporters have packed the courtroom gallery, Mr. Penny’s relatives were less evident until his mother and sister testified almost five weeks into the trial. His sister Jacqueline Penny described an idyllic suburban childhood on Long Island. Together, the two women bolstered the image of Mr. Penny, 26, that his lawyers had been trying to paint: that of a small-town young man, kind and patriotic, who had protected a subway car from a troubled man in the midst of a psychotic episode on the afternoon of May 1, 2023.
A forensic psychiatrist hired by Mr. Penny’s defense team testified that Mr. Neely had one of the worst cases of paranoid schizophrenia he had ever seen, showing the victim’s medical records on video screens scattered throughout the courtroom. Mr. Zachery stared straight ahead, as if unseeing.
Mr. Zachery has not been heard from since the first day of the trial, when he murmured to a few reporters, “I feel hurt.”
Dr. Blumkin said that at the hospital where he works, such emotional turmoil is pervasive among relatives of patients and in support groups.
“There’s sort of this idea of grief and loss,” he said. “If you have somebody who’s estranged — maybe they’re isolated, maybe they’re institutionalized — there’s this sense of losing them, especially if they’re homeless and we don’t know if they’re safe where they are.”
Since Mr. Neely’s death, his uncle Christopher has been taking it day by day. He plays chess. He seeks solace in faith and in the fellowship he has found among social justice groups that have staged protests in his nephew’s name.
“That’s how we’ve been coping, and just been dealing with the burden,” he said.
A few days before the defense rested its case, he told a small group of reporters outside the courthouse that while he had ultimately not been able to protect his nephew, he had done his best.
“I wasn’t a perfect uncle, but I loved my family and I would do anything for my family,” he said.
He has become the family’s de facto spokesman while Jordan Neely’s father, Mr. Zachery, has remained largely silent. A lawyer representing Mr. Zachery, Lennon Edwards, said in a statement that his client was enduring unfathomable pain each day.
“If you want to know what hell feels like to a parent, it’s having to watch your child be murdered over and over and over again on video in the courtroom and sit there,” he said.
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