The attorney for 24-year-old former Marine Daniel Penny said during an interview on Monday that the Jordan Neely had started “swinging his arms at passengers” on a subway in New York City when his client stepped in to protect the passengers.

Penny placed Neely, a homeless man with over 40 arrests and a history of mental health issues, in a chokehold after Neely embarked on an aggressive rant and began screaming that he did not care if he went to jail.

Appearing in his first interview for the case, attorney Steve Raiser was asked by Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro what Penny’s mindset was when he put Neely into a chokehold.

“He was fearful for the safety of those passengers,” Raiser said. “So when he acted, his mindset was to keep his fellow passengers safe from attack. Neely entering the train and acting in a very violent manner, both physically and with words. He would say things to the effect that, you know, I need certain things, I need food, I need this or that. And if I don’t get it, I don’t care if I go to prison for the rest of my life. And the passengers actually have said that they interpreted that to mean, well, when would you go to prison for the rest of your life if you kill somebody? So everybody got the message.”

Raiser said that the situation rapidly escalated to the point where Neely was “swinging his arms at passengers, throwing his jacket down, [and] making threats” toward the passengers.

Raiser says that they were told that a grand jury was going to be impaneled to go through “a very deliberate process” to determine if charges should be brought in the case and that they “got a call one night before Danny was asked to surrender and said he’s got to surrender to the police department tomorrow so at that point we were like, what do you mean tomorrow, this was going to be a long process suddenly it’s tomorrow.”

Raiser dismissed critics who claim that Penny only acted because Neely was black.

“None of that is based on the facts,” he said. “As to race, it’s simply not the motivation for Danny. He is the one that put himself in danger, to save who? All the people on that train. Black people, brown people, white people, it didn’t matter to Danny. Danny put his life at risk to save all those people. It has nothing to do with race.”

Related: Marine Vet Accused Of Killing Jordan Neely Turns Himself In After Charge Against Him Revealed

Researchers from the University of Florida said a new accidental discovery could help solve criminal activity or find missing persons after learning investigators could collect human DNA samples from the air.

According to Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers learned the potential source for fighting crime while studying endangered sea turtles and analyzing sand samples at a beach where the reptiles lay eggs.

“We cough, spit, shed and flush our DNA into all of these places and countless more,” the university’s team said in a news release.

David Duffy, the UF professor of wildlife disease genomics who led the project, said the discovery of gathering genetic information from a scoop of sand, a vial of water, or a person’s breath presents ethical dilemmas that scientists and regulators could face about privacy and surveillance to data ownership.

“We’ve been consistently surprised throughout this project at how much human DNA we find and the quality of that DNA,” Duffy said. “In most cases, the quality is almost equivalent to if you took a sample from a person.”

Researchers said they collected human DNA everywhere they looked, except isolated islands and remote national parks. The team found samples near ocean and river waters surrounding the university’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience and Sea Turtle Hospital. Duffy said even as far as his native land of Ireland.

“It’s standard in science to make these sequences publicly available,” Duffy said. “But that also means if you don’t screen out human information, anyone can come along and harvest this information. That raises issues around consent.”

Now that human DNA could be found and readily sampled, Duffy urged lawmakers and the scientific communities to push for consent and privacy measures.

“Any time we make a technological advance, there are beneficial things that the technology can be used for and concerning things that the technology can be used for. It’s no different here,” Duffy said. “These are issues we are trying to raise early so policy makers and society have time to develop regulations.”