Since the Daniel Penny trial kicked off, witness after witness has described the abject terror they felt while riding the uptown F train as unhinged homeless man Jordan Neely entered the car, snarling and threatening straphangers.
One teen testified that she was so frightened she thought she’d pass out.
An older woman was “scared s–tless.” A 29-year-old man said he was “pretty terrified.”
All testified that they’d never before experienced that type of acute panic while riding the train.
But on Tuesday, one was visibly petrified to be in that courtroom, with protesters outside and multiple Neely supporters inside.
Scared to be on the stand. To be a party to a potential 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 made him initially fabricate parts of his story to investigators.
Gonzalez, 39, was the man in the black cap seen in the now-familiar footage from May 1, 2023 — helping to 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 as the train was being held and that he stumbled upon the physical struggle unfolding on the dirty subway floor.
“Everyone was frantic and saying ‘call the cops,’ so I assumed one was trying to restrain the other until the cops came,” he said.
Gonzalez told the jury that he “jumped and tried to help.”
But after later learning that Neely had died and Penny had been arrested, Gonzalez was so spooked to be “pinned for a murder charge” that he took all of his vacation from work and went into hiding.
And when he initially spoke to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, he now admits, he fabricated parts of his story.
Two weeks ago, Gonzalez was given immunity to testify.
Yes, he admitted to lying about being on the scene much earlier and that Neely hit him, prompting Penny to swing into action. All that to save his own hide.
The admission took a wrecking ball to his credibility as witness. But it didn’t make Gonzalez an unsympathetic figure. His efforts to assist Penny, including struggling with Neely, taking the man’s pulse and rolling him on his side in a “recovery” position, was captured on video and examined frame by frame.
The footage proved that both he and Penny were ensnared by the old adage “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Despite his deal with the prosecutor, Gonzalez was still worried what would happen if his testimony were to help Penny go free.
“You’re scared of people that are looking for a prosecution of my client?” asked Penny’s defense attorney Steven Raiser.
“Yes,” Gonzalez said.
Raiser added: “You’re afraid that if you testified in a way that’s helpful to my client, you may suffer repercussions, correct?”
Affirmative.
“All these protests going on, I am scared for myself, I am scared for my family,” Gonzalez, a father of two said, underscoring how politically charged this farce of a criminal case is.
Throughout his testimony, Gonzalez’s face moved from deer-in-headlights horror to the shame of being caught in deception — the kind of shame that sends a Catholic right to the confessional.
But removing his words from the equation, the video showed that Gonzalez fearlessly intervened.
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, one is facing almost two decades behind bars. And the other, it seems, did everything he could to avoid being a helper again.
The perverse and dangerous lesson: Don’t get involved next time.
