The lawyer representing Daniel Penny voiced his frustration after New York City prosecutors said they will not seek charges for a man who they said acted in “self-defense” when he allegedly shot an aggressive subway rider earlier this week.
Thomas Kenniff told Fox News host Jesse Waters on Friday that he was “happy” to see that Younece Obuad, the man identified as the subway shooter, was not charged for defending himself from 36-year-old Dajuan Robinson. Penny’s lawyer, however, added that it’s “absolutely frustrating” to see his client charged while Penny was also acting to defend himself and others on the subway.
Penny, a Marine veteran, was arrested and charged last year with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after he restrained Jordan Neely, a homeless man who was allegedly threatening passengers on a subway car. Neely died following the incident.
“What’s interesting, Jesse, having watched that video, so much of what my client encountered last May on the subway when he was coming back from college and Jordan Neely entered the subway car … so much of it began in a similar way we see this video beginning,” Kenniff said.
“You really get an appreciation of how my client, Daniel Penny, handled this situation,” Kenniff added. “He went up behind Jordan Neely and used, not a chokehold, but a restraint move to take him down to the ground. It’s uncontested by the eyewitnesses who were on that subway car that Danny went down and took the fall and brought Jordan Neely down on top of him and restrained him with the intent of waiting until police arrived.”
“If you approach it a different way as we saw in the video you just showed and you square off with someone, you don’t know if they’re armed … and the situation can devolve into exactly what we saw on that video,” Penny’s lawyer said.
Robinson was shot on Thursday after getting into a verbal spat and then a fistfight with Obuad, the alleged shooter. Video footage of the incident showed Robinson yelling at the other man, “I’ll beat you up!” before getting in his face and saying, “F*** your race. F*** your kind. F*** you.”
Shortly after the two men got into the verbal tussle, they squared up, causing subway passengers around them to move to a different area of the train. “There’s babies on here!” one woman shouted as the men began to fight. Robinson eventually pushed the other man down onto a seat and punched him several times before a woman attempted to stop him from delivering any more blows.
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The fight was briefly broken up when another man, along with the woman, stepped in between the two men. The video showed blood on the back of the 36-year-old Robinson, who asked if the other man had stabbed him. Robinson continued to move toward the other man and eventually pulled out a handgun, causing passengers to scramble toward the other end of the train with some people screaming, “Get down! Get down!” and “Let me out!”
Multiple gunshots then rang out, but the video doesn’t show the shooting as the person recording runs off the train when it comes to a stop. Police said the 32-year-old man wrestled the Ruger .380-caliber firearm away from Robinson before shooting him four times.