1984 New York City Subway shooting

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1984 New York City Subway shooting began, by one account, with a request for five dollars. According to the New York Court of Appeals in 1986, it ended with Bernhard Goetz bending toward Darrell Cabey, who was cowering on the ground. Goetz said to him, "You don't look so bad. Here's another." He fired once more and missed.

  All four teenagers Goetz shot on the 22nd of December 1984 survived. Almost everything else about that afternoon was argued over for years. People disputed what was said in the car, who stood where, and what each person feared.

  The case sparked a national argument about crime, self-defense, and whether ordinary people could count on the police. The press gave Goetz a nickname, the "Subway Vigilante." What really happened in that car? Who was the man with the revolver? And why did a city, and then a country, take sides so fast?

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• 2. The Seventh Car

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  In the early afternoon of the 22nd of December 1984, four young men from the Bronx boarded a downtown 2 train in Manhattan. It was a Broadway-Seventh Avenue express. Three of them were 19 years old: Barry Allen, Troy Canty and Darrell Cabey. The fourth, James Ramseur, was 18.

  At the 14th Street station, 37-year-old Bernhard Goetz stepped aboard. About fifteen to twenty other passengers were already riding in the same R22 subway car, the seventh of ten on the train.

  The people involved and the witnesses do not agree on what came next. Canty asked Goetz how he was. Soon afterward he stood, walked over, and made some request for money. In Canty's telling, he approached alone and said, "Can I have $5?" Goetz remembered it differently. He said another teenager had joined Canty, and that Canty spoke in a "normal tone" of voice, with a smile on his face, saying, "Give me five dollars."

  The train conductor came into the car soon after the shots and called out, "What's going on?" Goetz pointed toward the north end of the car. "I don't know... they tried to rob me and I shot them," he said. The conductor asked whether Goetz was a police officer, and Goetz said he was not. When the conductor asked for the gun, Goetz refused to hand it over.

  Early news reports got a good deal wrong. They disagreed about the order and timing of the shots, about whether Cabey had been hit once or twice, and about whether any of the four had been armed. Later reporting showed that Cabey was shot only once, in his left side. Some early reports said the teenagers had walked up to Goetz carrying "sharpened" screwdrivers. That turned out to be false.

  Cabey carried two screwdrivers and Ramseur carried one. None of them was sharpened. Based on the testimony, none was taken out of a pocket, and no witness reported seeing one. Goetz himself repeatedly denied that screwdrivers had threatened him. At the criminal trial, Canty said the tools were meant for breaking into the change boxes of video arcade machines, and that he and the others were on their way to steal from them. A jury would have to decide what to make of that.

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• 3. The Engineer's Flight

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  Bernhard Hugo Goetz was born on the 7th of November 1947 in Kew Gardens, Queens, to German immigrants. His father was Lutheran. His mother had been Jewish before converting to Lutheranism. He grew up in Upstate New York with his parents and three older siblings, where his father ran a dairy farm and a bookbinding business.

  Goetz attended boarding school in Switzerland. He then earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and nuclear engineering from New York University. He moved to Orlando, Florida, where his family had relocated, and worked in his father's residential development business. After a divorce he returned to New York City and started an electronics business from his Greenwich Village apartment.

  In early 1981, by Goetz's own account, he was robbed at the Canal Street subway station. He said three black teenagers smashed him into a plate-glass door and threw him to the ground, hurting his chest and knee. He struggled with one of them until police arrived, and that teenager accused Goetz of assaulting him. Goetz was held for six hours. The person he accused was released after two and a half hours.

  Goetz then applied for a permit to carry a concealed handgun, citing the valuable equipment and large sums of cash he routinely carried. The application was denied for "insufficient need." On a trip to Florida he bought the five-shot .38-caliber revolver he would later use on the train.

  His neighbor Myra Friedman said she overheard Goetz at a community meeting about eighteen months before the shooting. By her account, he said the only way to clean up the street was to get rid of Hispanic and Black residents, using slurs for both. The criminal jury never heard her account. In a later civil action, Goetz admitted using both slurs at a neighborhood meeting.

  After the shooting, Goetz took a cab back to his 14th Street home. He then rented a car and drove north to Bennington, Vermont. There he burned the distinctive blue jacket he had been wearing and scattered the pieces of his gun in the woods. He spent several days at various hotels in New England.

  On the 26th of December, an anonymous caller to a police hotline said Goetz matched the gunman's description, owned a gun, and had been assaulted before. On the 29th, Goetz telephoned Friedman. She told him that police had come to his apartment and left notes asking him to get in touch. Goetz told her he had felt as though he was in a "combat situation," needing to "think more quickly than his opposition."

  He came back to New York City on the 30th of December. He turned in the car, collected some clothing and business papers from his apartment, rented another car, and drove back to New England. Shortly after noon the next day, he walked into police headquarters in Concord, New Hampshire. He told the officer on duty, "I am the person they are seeking in New York."

  Once the officer realized Goetz was a genuine suspect, Goetz was read his rights and chose to talk. Concord police made an audio recording of the interview. New York City detectives Susan Braver, Michael Clark and Dan Hattendorf later questioned him on video, producing a two-hour recording. Both interviews were played at his criminal trial.

  Goetz told the police he felt he was being robbed and was at risk of violence. He said he had been mugged once before and nearly mugged several times. He described one of the young men, Canty, and "the gleam in his eye... and the smile on his face." Asked what he intended when he drew the revolver, Goetz replied, "My intention was to murder them, to hurt them, to make them suffer as much as possible."

  Later in the tape he said, "If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets." He also said he had meant to gouge out Canty's eyes with his keys, but stopped when he saw the fear in them. He denied any premeditation, something the press had speculated about.

  Those tapes were still waiting to be played in a courtroom when Goetz was brought back to Manhattan on the 3rd of January 1985.

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• 4. Grand Juries and Self-Defense

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  On the 3rd of January 1985, Goetz was arraigned on four charges of attempted murder, with bail set at $50,000. He was held in protective custody in the Rikers Island prison hospital. He turned down offers of bail help from the public and from his family. He posted bail with his own funds and was released on bond on the 8th of January.

  Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau asked a grand jury for indictments on four counts of attempted murder, four of assault, four of reckless endangerment, and one of criminal possession of a weapon. On the 25th of January, the grand jury refused the serious charges. It voted indictments only on gun possession. One count covered the loaded, unlicensed gun he carried in public. Two more covered two other unlicensed handguns he kept at home.

  In March 1985, Morgenthau announced that the state had an unnamed witness and new evidence. He asked to convene a second grand jury, and Judge Stephen Crane agreed. Morgenthau also granted immunity to Troy Canty and James Ramseur, something he had earlier declined to do. That let them testify. The second grand jury indicted Goetz on attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment and weapons possession.

  In January 1986, Crane granted Goetz's motion to dismiss those indictments, on two grounds. First, the prosecutor had told the grand jury that self-defense under New York's statute required the defendant's actions to be objectively reasonable, and Crane held that instruction was an error. Second, he found that Canty and Ramseur "strongly appeared" to have perjured themselves.

  The prosecution appealed. It argued that self-defense did require objective reasonableness, and that the statements Crane relied on did not show perjury. An appellate division upheld the dismissal. In July 1986, the New York Court of Appeals reversed that ruling and reinstated the charges.

  The high court held that a defendant's own perception of imminent danger does not by itself justify force. The belief must be both subjectively held and objectively reasonable. It also called the perjury finding "speculative" and "particularly inappropriate." The court wrote: "There is no statute or controlling case law requiring dismissal of an indictment merely because, months later, the prosecutor becomes aware of some information which may lead to the defendant's acquittal."

  That December, jury selection began.

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• 5. Trial and Verdict

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  In April 1987, the trial opened before a Manhattan jury of ten white and two black jurors. Six of them had been victims of street crime. Goetz was represented by Barry Slotnick and Mark M. Baker. He conceded that he had shot the four men. His defense was that section 35.15(2) of New York's justification statute made it lawful.

  That section allowed deadly force when a person "reasonably believes" another is using or about to use deadly physical force, or is committing or attempting robbery, among other crimes. Justice Crane told the jurors that these were the two grounds that could justify Goetz's use of his weapon. Their task was to separate a vague sense of intimidation from a specific threat of robbery or of deadly force.

  Prosecution and defense agreed on three factual questions. Had the teenagers acted as a group or as individuals? Had Goetz shot Cabey after the immediate threat was over? Was Goetz threatened at all?

  Canty testified that he was merely panhandling when he asked for $5. Ramseur testified that Canty went to Goetz alone while he, Allen and Cabey stayed seated. But his testimony was stricken after he said he believed Goetz would be acquitted whatever the evidence, and then refused to answer Slotnick's questions. Neither Goetz nor Cabey testified. Allen invoked the Fifth Amendment.

  A witness named Amanda Gilbert said that Cabey, after being shot, told her, "I didn't do anything. He shot me for nothing." That was stricken as hearsay. The defense called police officer Peter Smith, who said Canty had told him the group planned to rob Goetz. On cross-examination, the prosecution noted that Smith never passed that statement to his superiors, or to a reporter in a television interview.

  The medical evidence split too. For the defense, Dominick DiMaio, Suffolk County's former medical examiner, testified that the four had stood in a semi-circle around Goetz. Charles Hirsch, the county's then-current medical examiner, said it was medically impossible to tell how the victims were positioned. He also found that the bullets that hit Allen and Cabey had traveled from back to front, suggesting both were shot in the back.

  Ballistics expert Joseph Quirk, for the defense, testified that Allen was hit while ducking, not running away. Under cross-examination Quirk conceded the prosecution's theory also fit the evidence. Shown a photograph of the wound in Allen's back, he admitted his theory had rested on incorrect information the defense gave him.

  The Cabey shot drew the sharpest dispute. Prosecutors said Goetz fired his fifth bullet into the seated Cabey at point-blank range. The defense said all five shots came in quick succession and the fourth hit Cabey before he collapsed. One witness said Goetz stood directly in front of Cabey, within "two to three feet," and fired downward into his stomach. That matched Goetz's police statement, which he has since recanted. Eight other witnesses said the shots came in "rapid succession," one saying the firing lasted "about a second." None of the eight saw Goetz standing in front of Cabey.

  The jury acquitted Goetz of attempted murder and first-degree assault. It convicted him of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, for carrying a loaded, unlicensed weapon in public. The first sentence was six months in jail, a year of psychiatric treatment, five years of probation, 200 hours of community service, and a $5,000 fine.

  Goetz appealed. He argued that the judge's instructions improperly discouraged jury nullification, and the appellate division and the Court of Appeals rejected that. He also argued the state's gun laws required a sentence of at least one year. Under the law then, a six-month sentence meant serving at least 90 days, while a one-year sentence allowed release after 60 days. The appellate court agreed with him and overturned the sentence. On remand, Crane sentenced him to a year and a $5,000 fine. Goetz served eight months, with credit for good behavior.

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• 6. A City Takes Sides

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  A Daily News-WABC-TV poll released in January 1985 asked 515 New Yorkers about the shooting. Forty-nine percent approved of Goetz's actions and 31 percent disapproved. The police hotline set up to gather information was swamped with calls calling him a hero. In March, Morgenthau said the letters reaching his office ran three to one in Goetz's favor.

  That same month, a Gallup poll of 1,009 adults found 57 percent approved of the shootings, and two-thirds said Goetz acted in self-defense. Among Black respondents, though, disapproval rose from 36 percent in January to 53 percent in March.

  Supporters saw a hero who stood up to attackers in a city where police seemed increasingly ineffective. The Guardian Angels, a volunteer patrol group of mostly Black and Hispanic teenagers, collected thousands of dollars from subway riders for Goetz's legal defense. The Congress of Racial Equality, a right-leaning civil rights organization, also backed him. Its director, Roy Innis, had lost two sons to inner-city gun violence and was later elected to the NRA's executive board. He called Goetz "the avenger for all of us."

  A legal group founded by the NRA, the Firearms Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund, donated $20,000 to the defense. The incident has since been cited as leading to successful NRA campaigns to loosen restrictions on carrying concealed firearms.

  Harvard government professor James Q. Wilson tried to explain the mood. "It may simply indicate that there are no more liberals on the crime and law-and-order issue in New York City," he said, "because they've all been mugged." Professor Stephen L. Carter took a darker view. In his words: "The tragedy of the Goetz case is that a public barely aware of the facts was rooting for him to get away with it. The tragedy is that a public eager to identify transgressors in advance decided from the start that Mr. Goetz was a hero and that his black victims deserved what they got."

  Race was never explicitly raised at the criminal trial. Professor George P. Fletcher argued that the defense team made a "covert appeal to racial bias." He pointed to the lawyers calling the men Goetz shot "savages," "predators" and "vultures." He said the bias "came out most dramatically" in a courtroom re-enactment. Four "fit and muscular" Black members of the Guardian Angels were asked to play the four teenagers and surround Goetz. Professor Bennett Capers called this a "backdoor race-ing."

  After the verdict, NAACP director Benjamin Hooks called the outcome "inexcusable." He said Goetz's own statements proved he "went far beyond the realm of self-defense." Representative Floyd Flake said, "I think that if a black had shot four whites, the cry for the death penalty would have been almost automatic." The Los Angeles Times reported that demonstrators outside the courtroom chanted, "Bernhard Goetz, you can't hide; we charge you with genocide."

  United States Attorney Rudolph Giuliani met with Black political and religious leaders who wanted a federal civil-rights investigation. Their spokesperson, attorney C. Vernon Mason, said they had 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." Giuliani's investigation concluded that Goetz acted out of fear, which he distinguished from a racial motivation. In a 2007 interview with Stone Phillips of Dateline NBC, Goetz admitted his fear may have been heightened because the four men were black.

  Before any of that, there was Cabey's record. Ten weeks before the shooting he had been arrested on charges of holding up three men with a shotgun in the Bronx. He was released on $2,000 bail and missed his next court date, which brought another arrest warrant. Each of the other three youths also faced a trial or hearing on criminal charges when Goetz shot them.

  The civil courts would take up the question of race very differently.

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• 7. Judgment and Aftermath

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  A month after the shootings, Cabey, represented by William Kunstler and Ron Kuby, filed a civil suit against Goetz. It was tried in 1996, before a very different jury. The criminal jury had been predominantly white and from Manhattan. The civil jury was half African American and came entirely from the Bronx. Crime in New York City had also fallen substantially since the first trial.

  Cabey's lawyers argued openly that race had motivated Goetz. Goetz admitted to using racial language before, and to smoking marijuana laced with PCP during the 1980s. For the defense, the writer Jimmy Breslin testified about a 1985 hospital-bed interview. In it, Cabey denied his own involvement but said the other three meant to rob Goetz because he looked like "easy bait." Cabey's lawyers answered that he had suffered brain damage before the interview, and that Breslin's own column called him "confused."

  The jury found that Goetz acted recklessly and deliberately inflicted emotional distress. It awarded Cabey $43 million, made up of $18 million for pain and suffering and $25 million in punitive damages. Goetz filed for bankruptcy, saying legal expenses had left him almost penniless. Because he was only "sporadically employed as an electrical engineering consultant," the expectation was that 10 percent of his income would be garnished for twenty years.

  In 2000, Kuby told reporters he had hired a firm that specialized in debt collection, but said Goetz seemed to be "living in voluntary squalor." Asked in 2004 whether he was making payments, Goetz answered, "I don't think I've paid a penny on that."

  Goetz also went to court as a plaintiff. In 1990 he sued Cabey, Cabey's mother Sherry, and the lawyers Kunstler and Kuby for defamation, and the suit was dismissed. In 1994 he sued over Kunstler's book My Life as a Radical Lawyer, published by Carol Communications. He objected to its description of him as a "paranoid" "murderous vigilante" who had "developed a hatred for blacks." The court granted summary judgment to the defendants. It found the statements were protected opinion, not defamatory, or substantially true.

  Darrell Cabey fell into a coma after the shooting. His spine was severed, and he was left with irreversible brain damage and paralysis from the waist down. In 1985 an outstanding armed robbery charge against him was dropped when the Bronx district attorney found he had the capacity of an 8-year-old. Goetz accused Cabey of exaggerating his injuries. In two depositions, Goetz could not draw an answer longer than a single sentence from him. Asked whether he had ever heard the name "Bernie Goetz," Cabey said no.

  The other three went different ways. Troy Canty entered drug-rehabilitation and vocational-training programs, and his attorney Scott H. Greenfield said he planned to attend culinary school. In March 1985, James Ramseur told police that two men apparently hired by Goetz had kidnapped him and tried to kill him. The next day, detectives played him the 911 recording, and he admitted it was his voice and the report was fabricated. He said it was a test of how police responded when a Black person was the victim. He was not prosecuted.

  Ramseur was convicted in 1986 of the 1985 rape and robbery of a young pregnant woman. He was conditionally released in 2002, returned to prison in 2005 for a parole violation, and finished his sentence in July 2010. On the 22nd of December 2011, the shooting's 27th anniversary, he died at age 45 of a drug overdose, in an apparent suicide. In 1989, Barry Allen was charged with robbing a 58-year-old man of $54. He was convicted in 1991 and sentenced to 3.5-7 years.

  Goetz became a celebrity. In 2001 he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City, and among his proposals was a vegetarian menu in the city's schools, jails and hospitals. In 2004, Nancy Grace interviewed him on Larry King Live, and he said his actions had been good for the city and forced it to face crime. In 2005 he ran unsuccessfully for public advocate and described the subway shooting on his campaign website.

  In late 2013, Goetz was arrested for allegedly trying to sell marijuana to an undercover police officer. His attorney moved for dismissal on speedy-trial grounds. A judge agreed that prosecutors had taken 14 days too long, and the case was dismissed in September 2014.

  The city around him changed. Crime in New York City reached an all-time peak in 1990 and then dropped dramatically through the rest of the decade. By 2014, crime rates were comparable to those of the early 1960s.

  The shooting left a mark on popular culture. Billy Joel mentioned Bernie Goetz in his 1989 song "We Didn't Start The Fire." In the 30 Rock episode "Subway Hero," Jack calls Dennis Duffy "the greatest New Yorker since Bernie Goetz." The board game The Subway Vigilante was inspired by the shooting and sold 40,000 copies. The protagonist of the 2019 film Joker was partly inspired by Goetz, according to the film's writer, producer and director Todd Phillips. Phillips grew up in New York City and remembered the shooting from his youth.

  In 2023, civil rights leader Al Sharpton and former assistant district attorney Mark Bederow both compared the Goetz case to the killing of Jordan Neely. Nearly four decades on, the 1984 subway shooting was still the case people reached for.

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