Twitter sleuths use yearbook photos, tabloid goof to unearth alleged subway killer’s name
Update 10:26am CT: The Daily Mail confirmed the identity of the subway assailant as former Marine Daniel Penny.
The original article appears below.
On Monday, a former Marine killed Jordan Neely, placing him in a chokehold on the New York City subway.
While Neely was almost immediately identified as the victim, the name of the assailant wasn't released by police.
Four days later, it took a combination of Twitter sleuths and a goof by a big tabloid to reveal who was potentially behind it.
Now, the internet is rife with posts claiming the man on the subway has been identified.
In a piece Thursday, headlined "AOC now brands Jordan Neely's NYC subway chokehold death a 'public execution,'" by the Daily Mail, users online noticed that a person's name was included in a caption twice, identifying that person as Neely's killer.
"Someone noticed they put his last name in the caption of the photo on a daily mail article despite leaving it out of the article itself. It’s still there as of now," a Twitter user wrote, linking to the Daily Mail piece.
The Daily Dot could not confirm the veracity of the Daily Mail screenshots. Archived versions show what internet sleuths say is the updated caption, which appears to have been removed.
The current version of the article does not include the image in question.
The Daily Mail did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Around the same time, an anti-police activist Twitter account published what they said were yearbook photos of the killer, who they say resides in Long Island, approximately 20 minutes outside the city.
The user said that several people independently confirmed the killer's name, and separately sent the images of their yearbook. The Twitter user did not immediately reply to a Daily Dot inquiry.
With a name in question, users were able to confirm that person served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and they began sharing images of him in his service gear and comparing them to the person filmed killing Neely.
Now, his name is all over Twitter and TikTok.
The New York Police Department did not respond to a request for comment about the identity of the killer possibly being revealed.
However, a recent piece by the New York Daily News was able to track down the history of the person's service with the Marines as well, leading users online to claim that newspapers have known the name for several days and were suppressing it.
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