Now, in the wake of subway passengers harming and killing another passenger, a homeless man, I am at a loss. In fact, I have always considered that, though our city has its share of bigotry, New Yorkers come together to help each other. Never have I thought they lacked empathy. Never in all of my decades have I felt that my neighbors in New York were hateful. Re “ Making Someone Uncomfortable Can Now Get You Killed,” by Roxane Gay (Opinion guest essay, May 5): Jordan Neely is forcing us to ponder that in many ways, we all share some responsibility in his tragic death. We encounter these human beings every day, and most of us simply keep moving on because contemplating the moral stain this crisis is on all of us is too much to bear. Neely represents just one of the thousands of homeless and mentally ill New Yorkers who exist on our streets, in our haphazard shelter system and often in the stations and trains of our subways. Meanwhile, they continue to sit on their hands and not make meaningful investments in solutions that might fundamentally address the city’s crisis of mental illness and homelessness.

Politicians and ordinary New Yorkers are pouncing on a debate as to whether or not a subway passenger who put Jordan Neely, a distressed, screaming homeless man, into a chokehold, killing him, should face legal repercussions. Re “ Subway Killing Both Stuns City and Divides It” (front page, May 5):

The rational male