“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action,” says Auric Goldfinger, the villain in the classic James Bond novel Goldfinger. In the wake of Daniel Penny’s ordeal of arrest and trial for intervening and neutralizing a homicidal criminal aboard a New York subway, New Yorkers who rely on that mode of transit can relate, experiencing what is now dispiritingly called “the Daniel Penny Effect” even as Penny was acquitted in early December.

In May 2023, Penny, now 26, was arrested and charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for having defended himself and other subway passengers against Jordan Neely, a homeless drug addict with 42 prior arrests—including three for subway assaults—who, witnesses testified, was threatening them. Neely subsequently died. For 17 months, Penny’s fate hung in the balance as Manhattan’s radical left legal apparatus prosecuted him as “the white man” whose actions, they falsely claimed, resulted in the death of a black man. When Penny was acquitted, racialist activists directed potentially threatening language toward him in the courtroom with no apparent consequences, while multiple Democratic politicians publicly decried his not guilty verdict.  

As I wondered in an earlier column for Chronicles in the days after that verdict, who would be willing now to take the risk of defending himself or others, even if doing so were the right thing to do?

Over the last ten days of 2024, New York found out that the answer is virtually no one. On December 22, Debrina Kawam, a 57-year old resident of Toms River, New Jersey, was burned alive and beyond recognition on a Brooklyn F train. The incident, which occurred at 7:30 on a Sunday morning, was widely witnessed and filmed in real-time by bystanders who neither intervened to prevent the attack nor to put out the flames that engulfed Kawam, who was later identified by an analysis of her seared fingerprints. The film even appears to show a New York City transit cop strolling by the subway car’s open door as Kawam burned to death, perhaps mentioning something into his handheld radio. The alleged attacker, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, is an illegal immigrant who was deported during the first Trump administration but reentered the country under Joe Biden.

Two days later, on Christmas Eve, a suspect later identified as Jason Sargeant allegedly attacked a 42-year old man and 26-year old woman in Grand Central Station’s subway terminal in two separate and unprovoked attacks after activating the emergency brake on a northbound 5-line subway and leaving the train. Witnesses claimed to have seen Sargeant randomly yelling at people as he wandered through the subway station, but no one intervened to stop him or help the victims, who were left to their own devices to summon aid. Imani-Ciara Pizarro, the female victim, later recounted that bystanders “just froze” as she was punched in the back of the head, knocked to the floor, and slashed in the throat. Sargeant was later apprehended by the police when they observed him entering the aboveground train station in an agitated mental state and stopped him.

A week later, at 1:30 p.m. on December 31, suspected assailant Kamel Hawkins, 23, allegedly pushed a 45-year old man in front of a 1-line subway at the 18^th Street station, in the heart of Manhattan’s once-posh Chelsea neighborhood. The victim miraculously survived the assault, which was also captured in a harrowing video, but again there is no report of anyone intervening to prevent an attack that could just as easily have resulted in his horrible death. Hawkins, who made it all the way to Columbus Circle before being arrested for attempted murder, had a prior arrest in 2019 for assaulting a New York City police officer. He now has an open criminal case for assault, harassment, and illegal weapons possession resulting from an October 2024 incident.

While these three easily preventable crimes demonstrate a clear pattern during what ought to have been a festive time of year, they are only a handful of the felony assaults reported on New York’s subway since December 1. Their swelling number marks a 40 percent increase over attacks in December 2023, despite Mayor Eric Adams’s promise to “flood” the transportation network with 1,000 police officers, New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s deployment of 1,000 National Guard troops to augment NYPD efforts, and the gaslighting claims of these and other incompetent Democratic politicians that crime in the city is down.

After Daniel Penny’s trial, in which the process was the punishment, it is hardly surprising that New Yorkers are reluctant to take any action that could result in their arrest and prosecution, even if it would save lives, prevent serious harm, make their city safer, or ultimately be vindicated in court despite the most determined efforts of the radical leftists who control Manhattan’s prosecutorial office. Those officials will continue to preside over this lamentable state of anarcho-tyranny until city residents turn them out of office and bring their city back to the high standards of safety it enjoyed under Mayor Giuliani. In the meantime, sensible New Yorkers should move to Florida, where our free state’s stand your ground laws will protect them.