Ryan Thoresen Carson had a lot in common with Daniel Penny.
It’s likely Carson would not have thought so and Penny wouldn’t think so: Penny is a former Marine, and Carson was a poet. But both were idealistic young men drawn to New York City. Both had their lives transformed — in Carson’s case ended — by New York City’s failure to deal with its growing crisis of street violence.
Carson, 31, an environmental-policy researcher at the New York Public Interest Research Group, came to New York from Massachusetts in 2010 and set about trying to make the city a better place.
He thought every life was worth saving: In addition to environmental work, he called on then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021 to reduce drug deaths. “Overdose deaths are largely preventable,” he wrote.
Whether you agree with Carson’s prescriptions is not what matters. He cared about his fellow city residents.
And he trusted New York to keep him safe — so much so, he felt comfortable walking with his girlfriend in Bed-Stuy in the middle of the night, just before 4 a.m. Monday.
New York City did not keep him safe.
Carson joined the skyrocketing ranks of “random” murder victims when 18-year-old Brian Dowling allegedly accosted him and stabbed him multiple times, spitting on Carson’s girlfriend before fleeing.
Carson heroically defended his girlfriend, and tried to defend himself, using physical force to attempt to subdue Dowling after his attempt to calm the man — “Chill! Chill!” — failed.
Carson’s friends, many of whom I am friendly with, do not want to view the video of his murder, which is understandable.
But everyone else should watch, to see how quickly a man making a threat — “I’ll kill you!” — can carry out that threat. Split seconds.
In May, Daniel Penny, 24, a Long Islander going to school in the city, was faced with the same horrible choice in a similarly horrible few seconds.
Jordan Neely, 30, began menacing fellow passengers on a Manhattan F train. “I’m gonna kill you,” Neely kept threatening riders (an account backed by a female witness).
Penny, with no idea whether Neely was armed and knowing, from military training, he didn’t have time to find out, put Neely in a fatal chokehold. Was it justified self-defense? Did Penny keep Neely subdued for too long? That’s for a jury to decide.
One thing is indisputable: Like Carson, Penny set about his business in New York’s dense public space that day with no intent to do anyone harm. He had served as a Marine to keep fellow citizens safe. “I’m deeply saddened by the loss of life,” he has said of Neely.
The city could have prevented these two young men — Carson and Penny — from having to make these split-second decisions.
Neely had a long violent record, including randomly breaking an elderly woman’s nose, and a long history of severe, untreated mental illness.
New York City should have had him in custody before he ended up on that Manhattan F train — whether in jail or in a mental facility.
Similarly, it turns out, Dowling, Carson’s alleged murderer, was already well-known to New York City officials, despite being just 18.
He received two disorderly-conduct summonses last year (this is not easy to do). His aunt, who calls him “disturbed,” called police two months ago, as he behaved menacingly toward his girlfriend.
New York City already knows that a young man behaving increasingly erratically and violently is not going to fix himself. This never ends well.
But police didn’t arrest him as a lever to get him into mandatory mental-health treatment.
New York’s City’s lenient approach, relative to a few years ago, isn’t doing anyone any favors.
Neely, like Carson, is dead. Dowling, who wasn’t so mentally ill that he didn’t think to retrieve his murder weapon before fleeing Monday, faces years in state prison, as does Penny. This is why we used to prevent crime, not react to it.
Are these “random” murders rare and unpreventable?
No. Carson joins Tommy Bailey, Daniel Enriquez, Michelle Go, Charles Moore, Alison Russo and Christina Yuna Lee, just a few victims of last year’s 60 stranger-on-stranger murders.
That’s the highest tally in recent history: The annual average between 2016 and 2019 was 23 (including eight terror-attack victims in 2017).
As Jason Williams, father of Ethan Williams, 20, killed by a “stray” bullet in 2020 as Ethan thought it was safe enough to sit outside after midnight in central Brooklyn, observes after Carson’s murder, “There is a lot of romanticization of places like NYC. . . . I could go out to a school right now here” — in Indianapolis — “and easily find 50 NYC shirts in an hour amongst our student population.”
“But for a middle-class kid with middle-class idealism,” he continues, “they don’t know what they don’t know — until they know, and that’s where this story ends.”
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
