1984 New York City Subway shooting

In the early afternoon of December 22, 1984, four males in their late teens from the Bronx—19-year-olds Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and Darrell Cabey, and 18-year-old James Ramseur—boarded a downtown 2 train (a Broadway–Seventh Avenue express). Canty would later testify that the victims were en route to steal from video arcade machines in Manhattan. 37-year-old Bernhard Goetz boarded the train at the 14th Street station in Manhattan. At the time, about fifteen to twenty other passengers were in a R22 subway car, the seventh car of the ten-car train. Those involved and witnesses disagree what happened next. Troy Canty asked Goetz how he was, and shortly thereafter stood up, approached Goetz, and made some overture for money: According to Canty he alone approached Goetz, and said, "Can I have $5?" (~$15 in 2026). According to Goetz, Canty was joined by another of the teens and Canty said, "Give me five dollars" in a "normal tone" of voice with a smile on his face. In 1986, the NY Court of Appeals concluded from grand jury evidence that Goetz pulled a handgun and fired four shots at the four men, initially striking three of them. After initially opening fire, Goetz then bent down to Cabey, who was cowering on the ground, and said, "You don't look so bad. Here's another," and shot once again, missing. Cabey's spine was severed, resulting in brain damage and partial paralysis. Shortly after the shooting, the train conductor entered the car and loudly exclaimed, "What's going on?" He approached Goetz and asked what happened. Goetz pointed to the north end of the car and then told him, "I don't know ... they tried to rob me and I shot them." The conductor then went to the passengers to check if they were injured. The conductor asked Goetz if he was a police officer, which Goetz denied. He then asked Goetz for the gun, which Goetz refused to turn over. ==Shooter==

Bernhard Hugo Goetz was born on November 7, 1947, in the Kew Gardens, Queens neighborhood to German immigrants. His father was Lutheran and his mother was Jewish before converting to Lutheranism. While growing up, Goetz lived with his parents and three older siblings in Upstate New York, where his father ran a dairy farm and a bookbinding business. Goetz attended boarding school in Switzerland before returning to the United States to obtain a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and nuclear engineering from New York University. Goetz reported that three black teenagers had smashed him into a plate-glass door and thrown him to the ground, injuring his chest and knee. Friedman's account was excluded from the criminal jury trial, but in a subsequent civil action, Goetz admitted to having used both epithets at a neighborhood meeting. ==Victims==

Each of the four youths shot by Goetz was facing a trial or hearing on criminal charges at the time of the incident. Ten weeks prior to being shot, Cabey was arrested on charges that he held up three men with a shotgun in the Bronx, and he was released on $2,000 bail. Cabey failed to appear at his next court date, resulting in an additional arrest warrant. ==Goetz's flight, surrender, and interrogation==

After the shooting, Goetz took a cab back to his 14th Street home before renting a car and driving north to Bennington, Vermont; he then burned the distinctive blue jacket he had been wearing and scattered the pieces of his gun in the woods. Goetz stayed at various hotels in New England for several days. On December 29, Goetz called his neighbor, Myra Friedman, who told him that police had come by his apartment looking for him and had left notes asking to be contacted as soon as possible. Goetz told police that he felt that he was being robbed and was at risk of violence, and he explained he had been both mugged once before and nearly mugged several times: Asked what his intentions were when he drew his revolver, Goetz replied, "My intention was to murder them, to hurt them, to make them suffer as much as possible." Goetz also said that, after firing four shots, he moved to Cabey and said, "You seem to be doing all right, here's another," before shooting at him again, missing. He denied any premeditation for the shooting, something on which the press had speculated. ==Legal aftermath==

Criminal case Goetz was brought back to Manhattan on January 3, 1985, and arraigned on four charges of attempted murder, with bail set at $50,000. He was held in protective custody at the Rikers Island prison hospital. Refusing offers of bail assistance from the public and from his family, he posted bail with his own funds and was released on bond January 8. Indictments Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau asked a grand jury to indict Goetz on four counts of attempted murder, four of assault, four of reckless endangerment, and one of criminal possession of a weapon. On January 25, the grand jury refused to indict Goetz on the more serious charges, voting indictments only for unlawful gun possession—one count of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, for carrying in public the loaded unlicensed gun used in the subway shooting, and two counts of possession in the fourth degree, for keeping two other unlicensed handguns in his home. Morgenthau granted immunity to Troy Canty and James Ramseur, which he had previously declined to do, allowing them to testify before the second grand jury. In January 1986, Judge Crane granted a motion by Goetz to dismiss these new indictments. Judge Crane dismissed the charges on two grounds: First, he held that the prosecutor had erred when instructing the grand jury that, for Goetz's actions to be protected by New York's self-defense statute, they would have to be objectively reasonable. The prosecution appealed the case, maintaining that a self-defense justification required objective reasonableness and that the statements Judge Crane relied on did not indicate perjury or require dismissal. Goetz was represented by Barry Slotnick and Mark M. Baker. Goetz conceded that he had shot the four men, but he asserted that his actions were justified by section 35.15(2) of New York's justification statute, which, with non-relevant exceptions, permitted the use of deadly force when actor "reasonably believes that such other person is using or about to use deadly physical force ... or ... is committing or attempting to commit a kidnapping, forcible rape, forcible sodomy or robbery". As to whether Goetz had been threatened, Canty testified that he was merely panhandling when he asked Goetz for $5. Ramseur testified that Canty approached Goetz alone and that he, Allen, and Cabey remained seated, but Ramseur's testimony was stricken after he professed his belief that Goetz would be acquitted regardless of the evidence and eventually refused to answer Slotnick's questions. Neither Goetz nor Cabey testified, and Allen took the Fifth Amendment. For the defense, Dominick DiMaio, Suffolk County's former medical examiner, testified that Allen, Canty, Cabey, and Ramseur had been standing in a semi-circle around Goetz when he opened fire.—one said the firing lasted "about a second", Goetz appealed the conviction and sentence. As to the conviction, Goetz argued that the judge's jury instructions improperly discouraged jury nullification; the appellate division and New York Court of Appeals rejected that argument. As to the sentence, Goetz argued that the state's gun laws required, at minimum, a one-year sentence. On remand, Judge Crane sentenced Goetz to one-year incarceration and a $5,000 fine. receiving credit for good behavior. Civil litigation Cabey v. Goetz A month after the shootings, Cabey, represented by William Kunstler and Ron Kuby, filed a civil suit against Goetz. The civil case was tried in 1996. Unlike Goetz's criminal jury, which was predominantly White and from Manhattan, the civil jury was half African American and entirely from the Bronx. While race had only been subliminally addressed in the criminal trial, For the defense, Jimmy Breslin testified that, in a 1985 hospital-bed interview, Cabey, while denying his own involvement, said that Allen, Canty, and Ramseur intended to rob Goetz because he looked like "easy bait," but Cabey's attorneys pointed out that Cabey had suffered brain damage prior to the interview and that Breslin's column described Cabey as "confused." The jury found that Goetz had acted recklessly and had deliberately inflicted emotional distress on Cabey. Jurors awarded Cabey $43 million; $18 million for pain and suffering and $25 million in punitive damages. Goetz subsequently filed for bankruptcy, saying that legal expenses had left him almost penniless. A United States bankruptcy court judge ruled that the $43 million judgment was . Because Goetz was only "sporadically employed as an electrical engineering consultant," the expectation was that 10% of Goetz's income for the next 20 years would be garnished. Stephen Somerstein, one of Cabey's attorneys, expressed some optimism that a portion of any book deal Goetz signed could contribute to the judgment. In 2000, Kuby told reporters that he had hired a firm specializing in debt collection to pursue Goetz, but he noted that Goetz "appear[ed] to be living in voluntary squalor." The suit was dismissed. In 1994, Goetz filed another defamation action related to My Life as a Radical Lawyer, a book by Kunstler, published by Carol Communications, Inc. Amongst other claims, Goetz objected to the book's description of him as a "paranoid" "murderous vigilante" who had "developed a hatred for blacks." == Public reaction ==

The shootings initially drew considerable support from the public. A Daily News-WABC-TV poll released in January 1985 showed 49 percent of the 515 New Yorkers questioned approved of Goetz's actions, while only 31 percent disapproved. A special hotline set up by police to seek information was swamped by calls supporting the shooter and calling him a hero. The same month, a Gallup poll interviewing 1,009 adults found that 57% of respondents approved of Goetz's shootings and two-thirds said that Goetz had acted in self defense. However, compared to the January poll, Goetz's support among African Americans had dipped considerably: while only 36% of Black respondents disapproved of his actions in the January poll, 53% reported disapproval in the March poll. The Los Angeles Times reported that, during the criminal trial, demonstrators outside the courtroom chanted "Bernhard Goetz, you can't hide; we charge you with genocide." Initial sources differed in reporting the sequence of shots fired, timing of shots, whether Cabey was shot once or twice, and whether any of the men Goetz shot were armed. Some reports, picking up on Goetz's statement to the police, suggested that Cabey had been shot twice, Additionally, early reports suggested that the teenagers had approached Goetz carrying "sharpened" screwdrivers; those reports, too, were found to be false: The screwdrivers—Cabey carried two and Ramseur carried one—were not sharpened and, based on the available testimony, were not removed from Cabey's or Ramseur's pockets When Canty testified at Goetz's criminal trial, he said they were to be used to break into video arcade change boxes and not as weapons. Supporters viewed Goetz as a hero for standing up to his attackers and defending himself in an environment where the police were increasingly viewed as ineffective in combating crime. The Guardian Angels, a volunteer patrol group of mostly Black and Hispanic teenagers, collected thousands of dollars from subway riders toward a legal defense fund for Goetz. CORE's director, Roy Innis (who had lost two of his sons to inner-city gun violence and would later be elected to the executive board of the NRA), offered to raise defense money, saying that Goetz was "the avenger for all of us". A legal group founded by the NRA—the Firearms Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund—donated $20,000 to Goetz's defense. While race was never explicitly mentioned at the criminal trial, Professor George P. Fletcher argued that Goetz's criminal-defense team—which referred to the men Goetz shot as "savages", "predators", and "vultures" As to the criminal verdict, Benjamin Hooks, director of the NAACP, called the outcome "inexcusable", adding, "It was proven—according to his own statements—that Goetz did the shooting and went far beyond the realm of self-defense. There was no provocation for what he did." Representative Floyd Flake agreed, saying, "I think that if a black had shot four whites, the cry for the death penalty would have been almost automatic." United States Attorney Rudolph Giuliani met with black political and religious leaders calling for a federal civil-rights investigation. C. Vernon Mason, an attorney and spokesperson for the group, said, "We have come to the Federal Government as black people traditionally have done to seek redress when it is clear that state and local authorities have either failed to act or are incapable of acting." In a 2007 interview with Stone Phillips of Dateline NBC, Goetz admitted that his fear may have been enhanced due to the fact that the four men he shot were black. ==Subsequent developments==

After reaching an all-time peak in 1990, crime in New York City dropped dramatically through the rest of the 1990s. New York City crime rates by 2014 were comparable to those of the early 1960s. Darrell Cabey fell into a coma after the shooting; he suffered irreversible brain damage and was paralyzed from the waist down. In 1985 an outstanding armed robbery charge against him was dropped when the Bronx district attorney determined he had the capacity of an 8-year-old. One of Canty's attorneys, Scott H. Greenfield, reported that Canty planned to attend culinary school. The following day, after detectives played back to Ramseur the emergency 911 recording reporting the kidnapping, Ramseur admitted it was his voice on the call and to fabricating the report. Ramseur explained it was merely to test police response when a Black person was a crime victim, and was not prosecuted for this hoax. Ramseur was convicted in 1986 of the 1985 rape and robbery of a young pregnant woman. Conditionally released in 2002, Ramseur returned to prison for a parole violation in 2005; he finished his sentence in July 2010. In 1989, Barry Allen was charged with robbing a 58-year-old man of $54. In 1991, he was convicted and sentenced to 3.5 to 7 years. Goetz achieved celebrity status after the shooting. In 2001, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York City; amongst other issues, Goetz advocated for a vegetarian menu in New York City schools, jails, and hospitals. In 2004, Goetz was interviewed by Nancy Grace on Larry King Live, where he stated his actions were good for New York City and forced the city to address crime. In 2005, Goetz unsuccessfully ran for public advocate; In late 2013, Goetz was arrested for allegedly attempting to sell marijuana to an undercover police officer. In 2023, African-American civil rights leader Al Sharpton and former assistant district attorney Mark Bederow compared the Goetz case to the killing of Jordan Neely. ==In popular culture==

Bernie Goetz is mentioned in Billy Joel's 1989 song "We Didn't Start The Fire". In the 30 Rock episode "Subway Hero," Jack refers to Dennis Duffy as "the greatest New Yorker since Bernie Goetz." The protagonist of the 2019 film Joker is partly inspired by Goetz. Todd Phillips, who wrote, produced and directed the film, grew up in New York City and remembered the 1984 subway shooting from his youth. ==See also==