Daniel Penny SPEAKS OUT: 'I had to act!'

Daniel Penny is breaking his silence.

The 24-year-old Marine veteran was caught on video with his arm around the head and neck of Jordan Neely on the subway in May.

Neely died shortly after, and Penny was charged with manslaughter.

“This was a scary situation,” Penny explained in a video he has now released to the public.

Penny said that he stands at 6-feet-2-inches tall, and Neely was taller than him.

“There’s a common misconception that Marines don’t get scared,” Penny continued, “one of our core values is courage; and courage is not the absence of fear but how you handle fear.”

“I was scared for myself, but I looked around, I saw women and children. He was yelling in their faces, saying, saying these threats. I couldn’t just sit still,” he added.

Penny also said the interaction was less than five minutes — rather than 15 minutes as some have speculated.

“Some people say I was trying to choke him to death, which is also not true. I was trying to restrain him.”

Penny noted that in the video, you can see a clear rise and fall of his chest, as again, he was not trying to kill Neely but rather stop him from carrying out any of his threats.

“And then some people say that this was about race, which is absolutely ridiculous. I didn’t see a black man threatening passengers, I saw a man threatening passengers,” Penny continued.

Eric July joins Sara Gonzales on "The News & Why it Matters" to discuss why he believes Penny was right to defend those women and children.

“Jordan Neely had a very, very long rap sheet of criminal behavior — and yet — if you’re riding the subway in New York, you should be too scared to defend yourself or women and children around you,” July says.

“They’d much rather you be scared to death to the point to where someone does something to you, often irreversible — and they’d much rather that happen as opposed to you doing something and putting it in your own hands,” he adds.

“Because every time that happens,” July continues, that person is “met with some sort of consequence.”

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