Dec. 22, 1984: 'Subway Vigilante' Bernhard Goetz wounds 4 in NYC
Bernhard Goetz. (AP Photo)
Three days before Christmas 1984, New Yorker Bernhard Goetz was riding south on a subway train in lower Manhattan when he was approached by four teens. After one asked him for $5, the 37-year-old self-employed engineer pulled a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver from a waistband holster and fired five times, leaving each of them wounded.
When the train stopped, Goetz fled the scene without identifying himself. The victims, two of whom were hospitalized in critical condition, were quickly identified as having previous arrests. Two had screwdrivers with which they said they planned to pry coins from machines at a gaming arcade. Goetz was white, the victims were Black, and news of the confrontation soon reverberated across a city ravaged by violence and divided by race.
New York City in 1984 saw 1,459 homicides. Although Black-on-white murder comprised a minuscule percentage of that statistic, uneasy New Yorkers seemed to welcome a tale of anonymous vigilante justice. Hundreds called a tip line installed to aid police in their manhunt to express support for the “Subway Vigilante.” Some offered to help pay legal expenses if he was caught.
The reality, as even Goetz later confessed, was far more complicated. After the shooting, he rented a car and fled to Vermont, where he burned his clothing, dismantled his gun and tossed the pieces into the wooded countryside. He stayed on the lam using assumed names until New Year’s Eve, when he turned himself in after learning police were looking for him.
At a police station in Concord, New Hampshire, he confessed to the shootings, noting he’d purchased the gun after being brutally beaten in a 1981 mugging. During his confession, Goetz included a chilling admission: After an initial four-shot volley, he had lingered briefly over the young men and noticed one bracing himself against a subway seat. “You seem to be doing all right; here’s another,” Goetz told the youth, firing a fifth shot point-blank into his chest, leaving him permanently paralyzed.
“I don’t care about the technicality,” he raged at the New York City detectives dispatched to return him to the city. “The robbery had nothing to do [with] it.”
“I wanted to kill those guys. I wanted to maim those guys. I wanted to make … them suffer in every way I could—and you can’t understand this because it’s a realm of reality that you’re not familiar with. If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets.”
Indictments and trial
In January 1985, a New York grand jury refused to charge Goetz in the shootings, indicting him solely for his illegal possession of a gun. But after details of his confessions became public, Goetz was indicted by a second grand jury on charges of attempted murder and assault.
The case divided the courts as much as the public. The attempted murder and assault charges were dismissed by the trial judge, then reinstated on appeal. Moreover, during the years between the shootings and Goetz’s trial in December 1986, two of the victims were arrested—one convicted of rape—diminishing their credibility as witnesses. And on June 16, 1987, a jury acquitted Goetz of attempted murder and assault, convicting him on the gun charge alone.
Goetz ultimately served eight months in jail, and for the next two decades, he basked in the dim glow of minor celebrity, a remorseless reference for gun rights campaigns and racial distrust.
In 1996, a Bronx civil jury rejected Goetz’s claim of self-defense in a lawsuit filed by Darrell Cabey, the young man struck by Goetz’s final bullet. In addition to being paralyzed for life, Cabey fell into a two-month coma while in the hospital and emerged with permanent brain damage. When the jury returned a $43 million verdict against Goetz, he responded by filing for bankruptcy.
In 2001, Goetz ran for mayor of New York City, receiving 1,049 of 1.5 million votes cast.
