Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione each took different paths in life — and only one can be called a hero

Both Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione were born in 1998, the year that President Bill Clinton was impeached over the Monica Lewinsky scandal and three years before 9/11.

They were raised less than 250 miles apart: Penny on Long Island, and Mangione in Towson, Md., the only sons to loving families.

Penny is the middle child of three sisters, and Mangione has two younger sisters.

Both grew up into athletic and diligent young men.

Mangione’s upbringing was more privileged than Penny’s, and he was more academically successful.

He attended a prestigious Baltimore prep school that cost his parents $40,000 a year, graduating as valedictorian before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, where his passion was for devising complex computer games to simulate his fantasies.

He then worked for various tech companies including most recently as a software engineer at California online car seller TrueCar.

At some point last year, he left that job and started to travel, winding up in Honolulu after backpacking through Asia.

He reportedly loved Japan and spent time there earlier this year observing the culture, a bit like a professor studying ants, judging by emails that have surfaced online.

“Scary lack of free will in this country,” he wrote in one email to an acquaintance, describing an incident in which he went to the rescue of a man having a seizure but was critical of the slow response of police who waited for green lights despite the urgency.

“Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal,” he wrote.

Similar independence

Penny grew up in a less wealthy environment without the advantages that Mangione enjoyed.

He attended a public school, West Islip High, where he excelled at sports before joining the Marines, serving as a squadron leader on two overseas deployments.

After four years in the military, he spent several months working at a surf shop in North Carolina near Camp Lejeune.

He then enrolled in college but found it unfulfilling.

Like Mangione, he had come to a crossroads in his mid-20s and decided to travel the world in search of meaning.

“Growing up here in New York, I have always been inspired by the ambition and grit,” Penny said.

Penny dropped out of college and backpacked through Central America “inspired by the novel Don Quixote,” he wrote in an online job-seeking profile.

“Don Quixote [is] so inspired by adventure, he leaves his ‘normal’ life to pursue his dreams despite being called a madman . . . Being able to serve and connect with the most interesting and eccentric the world has to offer is what I believe I am meant to do.”

Until this year, the lives of these two restless young men tracked almost perfectly.

Penny was a top lacrosse player at West Islip.

Mangione played soccer and ran track.

Both liked surfing, Penny in Long Island and Mangione in Hawaii.

They even looked like the reverse mirror image of each other.

Handsome and strong, they both liked to wear their curly hair a bit long, with Penny blond and Mangione brunette.

Each man has been described by friends as a “people person.”

But there the similarities end.

One of these all-American 26-year-olds is allegedly a cold-blooded assassin who fatally shot a man in the back in Midtown Manhattan.

The other is a good Samaritan who saved subway passengers from a deranged vagrant who was threatening to kill them.

Mangione and Penny both have found themselves caught in the tender mercies of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg this year over two tragic and very different deaths in this city.

Both young men see themselves in heroic terms.

But Penny is the only hero.

Penny’s empathy

He never should have been charged over the death of a violent, drug-addled Jordan Neely, who was threatening passengers on the F train on May 1 last year before the former Marine restrained him with a chokehold.

Penny was driven by empathy for the women and children recoiling in fear as Neely, 30, shrieked “I’ll hurt everyone here! I’ll KILL you!!! I don’t care if I go to prison!!!”

The sad surveillance footage shows Neely struggling while Penny and another man restrained him for seven minutes.

When police arrived, he was breathing.

Despite a malign prosecutor who kept referring to Penny as “white man” and portrayed him as a racist, a unanimous jury — majority female and including four people of color — acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide this week.

“I didn’t see a black man threatening passengers,” said Penny.

“I saw a man threatening passengers, a lot of whom were people of color . . .”

“I was scared for myself, but I looked around, I saw women and children. He was yelling in their faces . . . I didn’t want to be put in that situation, but I couldn’t just sit still and let him carry out these threats.”

In an interview with Fox News’ Judge Jeanine Piro on Tuesday, Penny said: “I’ll take a million court appearances and people calling me names and people hating me just to keep one of those people from getting hurt or killed.”

Mangione — if he is guilty, as charged, of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, 50 — is no hero.

The man who walked up behind Thompson in the early-morning darkness of Dec. 4 and calmly pumped three bullets into his retreating body is a psychopath.

The harrowing surveillance footage begins with Thompson walking purposefully down West 54th Street toward the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, where he was due to give a speech at a conference.

It is to be the last journey for the 50-year-old father of two who pulled himself up by the bootstraps from a working-class family in rural Iowa, the son of a beautician and a grain elevator operator.

He went to a state school, South Hamilton HS in Iowa, where he was class president and homecoming king in his senior year.

He graduated in 1993 as valedictorian, just like Mangione.

The last moments of his life on that cold morning last week are captured in the grainy video police found from a camera on the street corner.

It shows the gunman emerge from the shadows wearing a black hoodie and cooly aim his gun at Thompson’s back.

CEO’s vicious killing

Thompson staggers, then stumbles to his right, clutching at the wall and looking back in shock at the gunman who calmly reloads, and fires a second shot as he walks towards his prey.

You can see the blur of Thompson’s face before he is spun around, staggers a few steps and slumps to the sidewalk.

The gunman fires a third shot as Thompson falls then walks briskly toward his victim.

But Thompson has stopped moving.

The gunman veers away across the street.

His sick real-life game has worked just as planned.

The words he engraved on the deadly bullets: “deny,” “defend,” “depose” evoke the tactics insurance companies are said to use to avoid paying claims.

But they are simply there to give him glory and the fake alibi of a valiant avenger.

When Mangione was arrested Monday at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pa., police allegedly found a rambling “manifesto” that presents him as a “hero” who did what “had to be done” because health-care executives like Thompson are “parasites” who kill Americans.

The words belie a life of narcissism and delusions of grandeur.

They are another transparent attempt to paint the premediated murder of Thompson as a noble mission.

And yet, it is Mangione and not Penny who has attracted swooning fans online who exhibit the same psychopathy and lack of empathy as their beloved anti-hero.

It speaks of a society that has lost its moral compass that Mangione sparks admiration while the valiant Penny is condemned as a “white vigilante.”

It shouldn’t have to be said. Cold-blooded murder is bad.

Risking your life to save vulnerable strangers from a violent predator is good.