On the first of May, Jordan Neely — a homeless New Yorker chronically struggling with mental illness and addiction — had the breath wrung out of him by a several-minute-long choke hold administered by ex-Marine Daniel Penny, who was alarmed by Neely’s behavior on the subway. What exactly prompted Penny’s action differs between accounts: some witnesses said Neely was explicitly threatening other passengers, others that he was just particularly belligerent about demanding food. Whatever the case, by the time police got to the scene, Neely was dead and officers let Penny walk free, turning the incident into a national flashpoint.

To any normal human being, the whole incident was a sad and wretched microcosm of everything that’s gone wrong in modern American life: from the callous failures of political leadership and the rippling tragedies of endemic poverty, to the deep-seated need among lost young American men to find meaning in violent heroics. But that wasn’t enough for some, who soon worked to turn Neely’s killing into something that wasn’t just a regrettable outcome of the long-standing depravities of the unequal US economy, but an act that was necessary and correct, in part to combat a scourge of violent vagrants threatening innocent Americans up and down the country.

“Why are regular people just being asked to be heroes in the subway?” asked cultural critic Thomas Chatterton-Williams, adding that people shouldn’t be asked to “tolerate abuse or the possibility of assault.”