New York City has a mayor who weeps for accused murderers and stays silent about their victims.

Jose Miranda’s family is furious, and they deserve to be.

And the story of what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did the morning Clarence Woodward died at Rikers Island is going to leave you red with rage.

What Mamdani Actually Did

On August 8, 2024, Jose Miranda was sitting inside the 303 Laundromat in the Bronx at roughly 2:40 in the morning when Clarence Woodward allegedly walked in and attacked him without provocation, stabbing him with a meat cleaver. Miranda, a 45-year-old father of two who worked as a barber, artist, and tattooist, was rushed to Lincoln Hospital. He died there. A second man, 47 years old, was slashed in the back and survived.

Woodward was a homeless parolee who had been released from prison approximately one month before the attack. He had 27 prior arrests on his record. He was charged with murder, manslaughter, and assault, and he had pleaded not guilty. He was awaiting trial at Rikers Island when he was found unresponsive in his cell recently and pronounced dead.

Within hours of Woodward’s death, Mayor Mamdani took to X. “I am deeply saddened by the death of a New Yorker in City custody at a jail on Rikers Island early this morning,” he posted. “My thoughts are with his family and loved ones as they grieve this loss. We do not yet know the cause of death, but we do know that too many New Yorkers have died on Rikers Island.”

Not a word about Jose Miranda. Not a word about the two children Miranda left behind. Not a syllable about the family that set up a fundraiser to cover his funeral costs. Mamdani pivoted directly from his condolences for Woodward to his administration’s push to close Rikers Island as quickly as possible.

New York City Councilwoman Vicky Paladino put it plainly on X: “I wonder if he was ‘deeply saddened’ by the murder this guy committed. Can’t find a tweet about that one.”

Conservative commentator Eyal Yakoby added: “He’s sad that someone who murdered an innocent American with a meat cleaver is dead. What are we even doing?”

Mamdani’s post racked up more than 3.2 million views, with the overwhelming majority of comments expressing outrage that the mayor of New York City had publicly grieved an accused killer while offering nothing to the family of the man he allegedly slaughtered.

Miranda’s Family Calls It What It Was

“It’s terrible,” Miranda’s mother, Marisol Miranda, told the New York Post. “That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all.”

“I’m not happy with what [Mamdani] did and I need him talking about my son. He was killed,” she said.

Miranda’s younger brother Angel did not hold back either. “He could have paid his regards but acknowledged us too,” Angel said. “He should have mentioned us first and then, ‘Sorry the person that did it also has passed away too.’ At least give us a little heads up and a little gratuity towards us. We lost a family member. You can never replace that. I’m still going through it. It was a slap in the face.”

A slap in the face. That is the exact phrase. And it fits.

Woodward’s death was the seventh in-custody fatality at Rikers Island in 2026. The cause of his death has not been determined. But whatever killed him, the man he allegedly hacked to death with a meat cleaver is still dead, and his children are still without a father, and the mayor of New York City has yet to say a single public word about Jose Miranda.

This Is What the DSA’s Soft-on-Crime Agenda Looks Like in Practice

Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an openly Marxist organization whose platform calls for defunding law enforcement and eliminating prisons. The DSA’s own program describes defunding police and weakening police unions as steps toward abolishing police and prisons altogether. Mamdani has publicly condemned what he called the “carceral state” and, when pressed by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on whether he supports the existence of prisons, offered the non-answer: “There are prisons.” When Jon Stewart asked him whether he was “comfortable” with calls to abolish prisons, Mamdani replied, “I’m comfortable with disagreement.”

That is the ideological backdrop against which he issued his statement mourning Clarence Woodward.

The DSA’s worldview holds that criminals are primarily victims of capitalism, poverty, policing, and incarceration itself. Under that logic, Woodward becomes a sympathetic figure and Miranda becomes an inconvenience to the preferred narrative. The mother burying her son, the children without their father, the brother still going through it two years later — they do not fit the story Mamdani and his political allies want to tell about prisons and who suffers inside them.

As the Daily Signal’s Jarrett Stepman chronicled earlier this year, Mamdani has been “deprioritizing crime-fighting” since the day he took office. He rearranged his own chain of command to reduce the direct influence of the NYPD commissioner. He has pledged to accelerate the closure of Rikers Island. New York City has been legally committed since 2019 to shutting down Rikers and replacing it with four smaller borough-based jails, a plan that critics warn would leave the city with far fewer jail cells and make it harder to keep violent repeat offenders off the streets.

Woodward’s trajectory makes that concern impossible to dismiss. He was paroled after serving time for attempted robbery and felony assault. Records show he had previously served two years for attempted robbery and was freed in 2012, and had been conditionally released in 2008 after three years for yet another attempted robbery. The revolving door spun again in 2024, and within a month of his release he allegedly walked into a 24-hour laundromat in the Bronx and killed a man with a meat cleaver.

But Mamdani’s response to all of that was to grieve the man who allegedly did the killing.

The communities that get hurt worst by this kind of governance are not the wealthy neighborhoods insulated from street-level crime. They are the working-class Bronx neighborhoods where Jose Miranda was sitting in a laundromat at 2:40 in the morning, minding his own business, when a repeat violent offender who never should have been back on the street walked through the door.

And the mayor of New York City had nothing to say about him.

Mamdani recently visited Rikers Island to watch a World Cup soccer match with inmates, calling it “one of the most meaningful evenings” he has had as mayor. He has not, by any public account, visited the Miranda family or offered them so much as a phone call.

That tells you everything about where this mayor’s sympathies actually lie. The DSA’s Marxist framework treats the criminal justice system itself as the oppressor and the people caught up in it as the victims. Actual crime victims, the ones left with funeral bills and fatherless children and brothers still going through it, are subordinated to the ideology.

Socialism always promises to protect the vulnerable. The record, in New York City and everywhere else it has been tried, shows the opposite. The people who pay the price for these policies are the people who can least afford to absorb the cost. Jose Miranda paid the ultimate price. His family is still paying it. And the mayor of New York City spent the morning of Woodward’s death expressing his sorrow to the wrong family.

Sources: The Daily Signal, “A Slap in the Face: Murder Victim’s Family Outraged as Mamdani Expresses Sorrow at the Death of Accused Killer” (Aug. 28, 2026); Fox News, “NYC Mayor Mamdani mourns Rikers Island custody death of murder suspect” (Aug. 2026); New York Post, reporting on Marisol Miranda and Angel Miranda statements (Aug. 27, 2026); PJ Media, “DSA Assault on Prisons Is Rooted in Third World-ist Lust for Barbarism” (July 23, 2026); political.org, “NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani ‘Deeply Saddened’ by Rikers Death of Clarence Woodward” (Aug. 2026); The Daily Signal, Jarrett Stepman, “Mamdani’s Early Moves Suggest ‘New Era’ in New York Is About Deprioritizing Crime-Fighting” (Jan. 5, 2026).