On Monday, Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator, died following an altercation with a Marine veteran marine on a New York subway. Witnesses say Neely was behaving erratically and threatening people, as well as throwing garbage at passengers before getting into an argument with a white passenger who put him in a chokehold. Neely died at the hospital after falling unconscious on the train.
Now, new information is coming out about the victim’s family history.
Neely’s mother, Christie, was murdered at age 36 in 2007, according to The New York Daily News. “His moms died — she got killed too. And now him?! She got killed [by] her boyfriend. And now him? By somebody else? I don’t know what to say,” Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, told the outlet.
Christie’s dead body was founded inside a suitcase near a Bronx highway, as The Daily News reported. Neely was only 18 years old at the time of his mother’s untimely passing. Testifying at the murder trial at that time, Neely said his mother and her boyfriend, Shawn Southerland, fought every day in their apartment leading up to her death. In 2012, Southerland was convicted of strangling Christie; he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Neely, who had been arrested 40 times, was wanted for an assault he allegedly committed in 2021.
Prior to his son’s death, Zachery said it had been four years since they saw each other, but he raved about his son’s impersonation of the late Michael Jackson. “He was very good at it. He was great at it,” he told The Daily News. “I sat him in front of the TV and showed him the Jackson 5…. He took on the Michael Jackson thing and he really formed it very well.”
The Marine veteran was released without charges following being taken in for questioning. The investigation is ongoing.
