But within a few days, as reporting relied less on anonymous law enforcement sources, journalists began poking holes in each of these details, and outright contradicted some of them.

By that time, though, the two men involved in the incident had been painted with broad brushes. Penny, a 24-year-old white man, was written not as someone who’d used a deadly martial arts position for several minutes straight, but rather as a Marine veteran looking for work as a bartender in New York. Neely, on the other hand, was a Black, homeless, mentally ill former Michael Jackson impersonator ― an “unhinged” “vagrant,” as the New York Post described him ― whose killing recalled an era “when residents felt besieged by crime,” as The Associated Press put it.

Even after the city’s medical examiner found that Neely, 30, died of a fatal chokehold, some outlets used passive, soft language and invited debate. A since-deleted tweet from the AP read: “The choking death of a man with apparent mental illness in the New York subway set off powerful reactions, with some calling the chokehold a homicide and others defending the passenger’s action as a defense against disorder.”

For several days, media reports withheld Penny’s name while printing Neely’s police record.

That record included dozens of arrests, some for assault and many for lesser charges like fare evasion. And police sources appeared to immediately leak Neely’s rap sheet to news outlets after his death, despite Neely having just been killed in public. The practice of leaking criminal records to reporters after a public incident is a habit for the NYPD, deployed after the arrests of countless defendants ― but not usually for homicide victims. A spokesperson for the department didn’t respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.

As Penny surrendered to authorities Friday on a manslaughter charge, pleading not guilty, the city’s media apparatus faced an urgent question: How had the victim of a killing so quickly been made into the villain?