Since the start of the Daniel Penny trial, witness after witness has described the terrible fear they felt riding the uptown F train when unhinged homeless Jordan Neely entered the car, growling and threatening with straphangers.
One teenager testified that she was so scared she thought she was going to faint.
An older woman was ‘fearless’. A 29-year-old man said he was “quite scared.”
They all stated that they had never experienced such acute panic while traveling by train.
But on Tuesday, people were visibly terrified to be in that courtroom, with protesters outside and several Neely supporters inside.
Afraid to be in the stands. To be a party to a possible acquittal of Penny and what that would mean for his personal safety.
And it was the fear of losing his freedom, Eric Gonzalez said, that initially led him to fabricate parts of his story to investigators.
Gonzalez, 39, was the man in the black cap seen in the now-famous footage from May 1, 2023 — he helped restrain Neely’s flailing arms as Penny held him in the chokehold that killed him.
The Bronx resident testified that he arrived at the Broadway-Lafayette subway station while the train was being held and encountered the physical struggle unfolding on the dirty subway floor.
“Everyone was panicking and saying ‘call the police,’ so I assumed one was trying to restrain the other until the police came,” he said.
Gonzalez told the jury he “jumped and tried to help.”
But after later learning that Neely had died and Penny had been arrested, Gonzalez was so afraid he was “being accused of murder” that he took his entire vacation from work and went into hiding.
And when he first spoke to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, he now admits, he made up parts of his story.
Two weeks ago, Gonzalez was granted immunity from testifying.
Yes, he admitted to lying that he had arrived at the scene much earlier and that Neely had hit him, prompting Penny to take action. All that to save his own skin.
The confession undermined his credibility as a witness. But that didn’t make Gonzalez an unsympathetic figure. His attempts to help Penny, which included wrestling Neely, taking the man’s pulse and rolling onto his side into a “recovery position,” were captured on video and examined frame by frame.
The footage showed that both he and Penny were caught up in the old saying ‘no good deed goes unpunished’.
Despite his deal with the prosecutor, Gonzalez still worried about what would happen if his testimony helped Penny get free.
“Are you afraid of people looking to prosecute my client?” asked Penny’s attorney Steven Raiser.
“Yes,” González said.
Raiser added: “You’re afraid that if you testify in a way that’s helpful to my client, you’ll face repercussions, right?”
Affirmative.
“All these protests are going on, I’m afraid for myself, I’m afraid for my family,” said Gonzalez, a father of two, underscoring how politically charged this farce of a criminal case is.
During his testimony, Gonzalez’s expression went from deer-in-the-headlights horror to the shame of having been caught cheating — the kind of shame that sends a Catholic straight to the confessional.
But disregarding his words, the video showed Gonzalez fearlessly intervening.
Both he and Penny activated their instincts to protect New Yorkers from the Gotham City-like chaos and violence that plagued the underground at the time.
Now they are behind bars for almost twenty years. And the other, it seems, did everything he could to avoid becoming a helper again.
The perverse and dangerous lesson: don’t get involved next time.
