New York City, December 22, 1984.
It is the day, as one person put it, “the whole world exploded.”
A number 2 subway train is passing through lower Manhattan.
On a dirty carriage festooned with graffiti four youths approach a man and ask him for
five bucks.
The man replies, “I’ve got five dollars for each of you.”
Amid the noise of the train, shots ring out.
A chaotic struggle ensues as all but two of the 17 other passengers flee the carriage.
The youths are lying on the floor when the train stops.
One of them has been hit in the chest, one in the side and two took bullets to the back.
The shooter seems to just disappear.
The last anyone sees of him is a silhouette slinking off into a dark tunnel.
This man’s actions would divide America.
What was he, a heroic vigilante fighting back in a city infested with crime, or was he a
cold-blooded killer with a heart filled with hatred and a mind set on vengeance?
Police soon released a sketch of the shooter, a man people were already comparing to Charles
Bronson’s character in the Death Wish movies.
A thousand cops were tasked with the job of finding the mystery shooter.
Each and every day they monitored the subway looking for him.
Every day the tabloids were just as busy as the police as they ran story after story about
the guy that took on a group of alleged muggers and won.
From New York to Newcastle, England, everyone was asking the same questions.
Who was this guy?
Was he a hardened criminal or just some dude on his way home from work?
The controversy around the shooting soon made the event the crime of the century, or at
least one of them.
Was it ok to take the law into your own hands in a city so rife with crime?
Was vigilantism necessary when the cops couldn’t protect you?
And what about the kids who were shot?
Did nobody have their backs?
What if they were just messing around?
What if they were merely panhandling?
What if the guy started shooting others around New York city, a place at the time called
the murder capital of America?
This was a city where many residents lived each day wondering if they were going to be
a crime statistic.
A place of daily carnage, where the sound of police sirens was never far away.
If the cops couldn’t stop the crime, maybe it was time for residents to take up arms
themselves.
These were the things people were thinking as the manhunt continued.
As one reporter put it, “We’re all sick and tired of being scared all the time.”
Those sentiments echoed around the city.
Rather than denounce a man for shooting four young men, a lot of people were saying he
was some kind of hero.
Their reasoning was that he had stood up for himself in a place that resembled the fictional
Gotham, especially for those that had to ride that decrepit subway system.
Things had been so bad on that subway system that a group had been working down there for
a while as vigilantes.
These guys called themselves the “Guardian Angels”.
Sure, they faced some opposition at first.
But who wanted to live in a city where violent crime was so pervasive the police just couldn’t
offer enough protection?
Had things gotten so bad that regular folks had to don a red beret and act as guards for
everyone else?
This group actually supported the mystery gunman.
They even wrote a letter to the mayor asking for an amnesty if he handed himself in.
“He felt the need to protect himself.”
That’s what they said again and again, and many locals, rich and poor, of all ethnicities,
joined in the chorus.
But things weren’t quite as cut and dried as they seemed.
For all the praise the Subway Vigilante got he received an equal amount of criticism,
especially as time went on.
What about the four kids that were shot?
They were Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and Darrell Cabey, all 19 years of age and all from the
South Bronx.
The fourth boy, James Ramseur, was 18.
They were no angels, with three of them having been convicted of small crimes before they
met the man who shot them.
None of them, however, had been arrested for anything close to a serious crime.
That night they got on the Broadway–Seventh Avenue Express with the intention of robbing
a video arcade in Manhattan.
That was the reason two of them had sharpened screwdrivers in their pockets.
That’s what they later testified, anyway.
On the way to that video arcade, two of them approached a man at the rear end of the seventh
car of the train.
They asked him how he was doing, to which the man replied he was fine.
One of the group then asked him for the five dollars, and you know what happened next.
The question is, just how aggressive were the teens?
Did asking for some cash really justify the man opening fire?
Surely just brandishing a weapon would have been a good enough warning.
And, why did he carry on shooting after he’d shot the first teen?
He hit another of the youths when one was already on the floor crying out, “Why did
he shoot me?
Why did he shoot me?”
When the teens were down and pools of blood were spreading over the carriage floor, the
man bent down next to one of the cowering teens and said, “You don't look so bad,
here's another.”
That teen was Cabey and the injury ensured he’d never walk again.
Does this sound like a hero to you?
For many people, he was exactly that.
Don’t make your decision just yet, though, because you need to hear some of the things
this man once said about racial minorities.
We’ll get to that soon.
Nine days later the gunman walked into a police station in New Hampshire and told cops he
was the Subway Vigilante.
His exact words were, “I am the person they are seeking in New York.”
He was no Charles Bronson, fragile in build and also demeanor.
Still, he had a blood lust.
He carried a lot of anger.
During those first talks with the cops, he was recorded saying he wanted to kill all
of the teens that night.
He even said he was disappointed he hadn’t got one teen in the head when he had the chance.
Who was he?
His name was Bernard Goetz.
He was a 37-year-old man who’d grown up with German immigrant parents in Queens, New
York City, but later during his childhood the family moved to Upstate New York.
It seems they weren’t short of cash, grossing millions a year from their family business
in the early 80s.
Bernard and his youngest sister were schooled for a while in Switzerland with the help of
the cash earned from their pop’s business.
That move, though, had a darker story to it.
Bernard’s father had been charged with sexually assaulting two 15-year old boys, so that was
more likely the reason why the kids were shipped off.
This was hard on the young Goetz, who was already the victim of bullying in school.
His sister, Barbara, later said the incident affected the young Goetz profoundly.
She also said after that he “seemed to be very coiled up.”
When Bernard returned to the U.S. he studied in college and left with a degree in electrical
engineering and then later he studied nuclear engineering.
As the 1970s were coming to a close, Goetz was a successful businessman producing precision
high-tech engineering equipment.
There was one thing that bothered him about New York City and that was the crime.
This was something Goetz was very outspoken about.
To him it seemed every day was a struggle to stay out of the way of violence, so when
he was mugged and injured by three teens in a subway station in 1981, he made a decision
to get himself a gun.
He did so illegally after being turned down for a pistol permit.
He was irate, not only because he’d been hurt in the mugging, but because those charged
with the crime got off.
Prior to that mugging he’d been mugged twice before that, and threatened another two times.
This was a bullied kid grown-up who still got bullied.
After his arrest he didn’t hold back about what he felt was the ongoing destruction of
a city he loved.
He called New York “lawless” and a “disgrace.”
He didn’t show an ounce of sympathy towards the kids he had shot.
In fact, he said this: “I wanted to kill those guys.
I wanted to maim those guys.
I wanted to make them suffer in every way I could….
If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again.
My problem was I ran out of bullets.”
Goetz said he had no intention of shooting people on the subway, but when he felt his
life was being threatened, he didn’t think twice about using his weapon.
He admitted that his objective when he pulled out that gun was to kill his assailants.
But were the teens so aggressive that Goetz rightly felt in fear of his life?
No one ever said they pulled out those sharpened screwdrivers, so was using the gun a massive
overreaction?
One of the teens did once admit that Goetz looked like “easy prey” and indeed they
wanted to rob him of his money.
The public was split down the middle at times after hearing this.
As the trial approached, many people still hailed Goetz as a hero and even wore t-shirts
with his face on them, while others condemned him for being an angry maniac with racism
issues.
Those folks had a right to think he was a maniac after hearing that Goetz told police
he was about to gouge out the eyes of one of the teens but only stopped when he saw
the utter fear in the kid’s expression.
Goetz couldn’t keep his mouth closed, which wasn’t to the liking of his lawyers.
Not only was he never repentant for what he’d done, but whenever he got the chance, he told
all New Yorkers to do as he had done and arm themselves in the fight against crime.
One time he even told a reporter that the mother of the boy who’d spine he’d severed
should have aborted her child.
Slowly the people’s hero was becoming something detestable, or at least to some of his supporters.
The case absolutely divided people.
Some saw Goetz as a fragile scientist who never had the strength to protect himself
in a rough city.
Others saw him as a depressive weakling and fantasist who should have thought more about
why such crime existed in the first place.
One person interviewed said she thought Goetz was not only right but he should run for President.
The crime of the century became the trial of the century.
Getz’s Chief Defense lawyer Joseph Kelner said, “The truth and the facts are that
he acted reasonably and understandably in a life-threatening situation.
He did not take the law into his own hands.”
Kelner talked a lot about the breakdown of society and how regular working people suffered
at the hands of criminals who often get off lightly.
Psychiatrists talked to the media and tried to explain why Goetz had so much support.
They all said the same thing.
People had lost their trust in the authorities, so Getz had become a kind of anti-hero for
them.
He was a white-collar guy pushing back against a wave of violence, and if he had some personal
problems that made him unlikable, a broken society had created him.
But this was also a racial issue.
Some people asked how the reaction would have been if an African-American had turned a gun
on four white teenagers who hadn’t brandished any weapons.
That, they said, would likely have led to the death penalty if it had happened in a
state that had the death penalty.
This is what one academic said about this: “There would be much more questioning about
Goetz's behavior if those were white kids.
The public is rather callous about this.
They have no sympathy for that young black kid who is paralyzed from the waist down.”
Even so, after polls were taken it seemed that Goetz had almost as much support from
African-Americans as white Americans.
49 percent of black folks said in that poll that they thought Getz had acted in the right
way as opposed to 52 percent of white people.
A conclusion many people came to was that if there was so much support for a man gunning
down four kids then one thing for sure was there was a problem in the USA.
When the trial happened, Goetz’s defense argued that what their client had done was
within the law.
What they were talking about was New York State's self-defense statute which in part
reads, “A person may not use deadly physical force upon another person ... unless ... He
reasonably believes that such other person is committing or attempting to commit” a
list of crimes that includes robbery.
The jury was made up of 10 white people and two black people.
Half of them had at one point in time been the victim of a street crime.
You might not be surprised then to hear that they acquitted Goetz of attempted murder and
first-degree assault, and he was only found guilty of carrying a loaded weapon without
a license.
For that, he served a total of eight months.
Civil rights activist, Al Sharpton, echoed the sentiments of many people who thought
Goetz hadn’t just got off lightly, but there had been a huge miscarriage of justice unpinned
by racism.
He said, “Mr Goetz was seriously psychologically damaged by former muggings and that in his
mind, young blacks are the stereotypical type muggers.”
He also said the boys were far from being role models, but Goetz was definitely not
a role model, either.
Had those boys have been white, said Sharpton, Goetz wouldn’t have pulled out his gun.
In fact, prior to Goetz committing the crime he’d attended a building association meeting
in which residents discussed cleaning up the neighborhood.
In that meeting, Goetz used crude and abusive racial slurs when he aired his opinion about
how he thought the black and Latino community were to blame for all the crime.
He also once said, “Forget about their ever making a positive contribution to society.”
In a civil case in 1996, Goetz admitted he’d used such hateful, racist language in the
past.
The jury found that Goetz had acted recklessly but he never paid a dime of the $46 million
that was awarded to Cabey.
To this day he’s never received any of that money.
In 2001, Goetz’s name was back on the front pages of the media when he unsuccessfully
ran for the mayor of New York.
He later made headlines in 2013 when he was arrested on a charge of selling marijuana,
although the charge was later dropped.
Goetz never repented for what he did.
In 2015, after a shooting on the New York subway, Goetz was asked if the man was comparable
to him.
He said no, but one thing that was the same was “troublemakers got shot.”
He was asked in an interview in 2017 if he regretted anything about the shooting, and
his answer was the same as it always has been, “No…No.”
Now you need to watch, “Crazy Things You Won't Believe Actually Happened In Court.”
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