One of several people who was assaulted by Jordan Neely has come forth to express his belief that Neely’s killer Daniel Penny should not be charged, providing details about his own experience being attacked by the homeless Michael Jackson fan in an interview this week.
Filemon Castillo Baltazar, who was attacked by Jordan Neely in 2019, gave an exclusive interview to the New York Daily News on Friday in which he described the incident and gave his candid opinion about Penny’s situation
“I felt a punch to my head. He didn’t say anything, he just hit me. He hit me above my right eye,” Baltazar said of the incident which occurred in Greenwich Village.
“Everyone in different situations has reasons for what they do. The Marine shouldn’t be punished. Who knows what that guy might have done to other people,” Baltazar said, adding that Neely “should have been in some rehab center.”
Since the incident on Monday, a great deal of new information has emerged about Jordan Neely, a mentally disturbed vagrant with a penchant for impersonating alleged antisemite and child molester Michael Jackson. Neely had an extensive history of seemingly random attacks on strangers and had even attained some notoriety on New York-focused social media long before his death.
As early as 2013, Reddit user Corazon-DeLeon posted on r/nyc warning readers to “stay away from” the once-beloved Michael Jackson impersonator, describing his increasingly unhinged and threatening behavior.
“Sometime in late Spring/early Summer I saw [Neely] in the train, his radio fucked up and he was angry as fuck, cursing and bad mouthing commuters screaming ‘What the fuck are you looking at? Dont fucking look at me!’ Totally didn’t expect him to act as such,” Corazon-DeLeon wrote. “Ever since that day he’s just been a scary dude to me. He doesn’t dress up anymore. No more dancing…just asks for money. Occasionally shouting obscenities.”
These incidents only seemed to become more common after Neely’s aforementioned attack on Baltazar. In 2021, Neely was arrested for punching a 67-year-old lady and knocking her to the ground, resulting in Neely entering an alternative-to-prison program for 15 months. He was also charged with attempted kidnapping for an incident in which he was seen dragging a seven-year-old girl for which he was sentenced to four months in prison.
Users on social media have also circulated an old video of Neely in a confrontation with another mentally disturbed drug addict, former “Howard Stern Show” co-host Joey Boots, who died of a fentanyl overdose in 2016. In the interaction from nine years ago, Boots approaches Neely and attempts to antagonize him by ridiculing his Michael Jackson costume. Eventually, Neely lashes out and attacks Boots. This clip has been contrasted with Boots’ attempts to antagonize the recently ousted Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson to which Carlson reacted by calmly bantering with Boots about his accent and showing off his fishing gear.
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