When I was going to New York City fairly frequently during the 1970s and into the early 1980s to see Broadway shows, concerts, and operas, the city was going through one of its worst eras. Street crime was rampant and the murder rate was climbing practically every year. Two of the worst areas for crime were Times Square and the subway system. Especially at night.
I sometimes drove to the city and sometimes took a bus or a train, and after the show was over I’d either walk or take the subway back to where my car was parked or downtown to the terminal. Sometimes I was by myself, occasionally I was with one or more people.
And in all those dozens of times that I wandered through that crime-infested jungle of a city, the only encounter I had with any individuals who might be termed law-breakers was when a hooker accosted me as I was strolling down Broadway. I simply ignored her and continued on my way.
Was I lucky or foolish?
If I had traveled the NYC subway day in and day out for over a decade rather than a mere two dozen or so times during that period, my story would likely be a bit different.
My point is that even when crime was at its worst in NYC, most folks were going about their business most of the time without any problems. In 1980 there were 1,821 homicides in New York City, which seems awfully high, and it is high. It’s one of the highest that NYC ever recorded. But keep in mind that NYC had a population of over seven million people; that’s 7,000,000. And even with that many homicides, that only placed NYC seventh in the nation. In other words there were six cities with even higher rates of homicide.
And so it was on the afternoon of December 22, 1984, when four Black teenagers traveled the subway, most likely on their way to vandalize some video arcade machines downtown, which was why they were carrying screwdrivers, but one of them had the gall to try to panhandle a white guy for five bucks. That guy happened to be fed up with crime on the subways and crime in the streets and had been mugged himself a few years previously by some young Black guys and had begun to carry a gun. And now claiming to feel threatened by these four Black teenagers on a crowded subway car in the middle of the afternoon in a moving subway train, he opened fire, seriously wounding them, and permanently paralyzing one and sending him into a persistent vegetative state.
Bernhard Goetz became known as the subway vigilante and divided the nation as some cheered and others condemned his actions.
His case played out over several years and gained world-wide attention, so there are probably very few folks even today who have not heard of him.
Now Elliott Williams has written Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation.
Regardless of your thoughts on the case and whether you followed it closely or not, there are bound to be lots of details in there that you’ve never encountered previously.
This is the case that transformed the NRA from a hunter’s organization into the National Rifle [Manufacturers’] Association that it is today.
If you don’t have time to read the book, perhaps you might want to listen to Elliot Williams being interviewed on the Bowery Boys podcast: NYC 1984: Remembering the Case of the ‘Subway Vigilante’
The last in the group, nineteen-year-old Darrell Cabey, was born in Queens and had five siblings. His mother, Shirley Cabey, was a food service worker for the state. She was fiercely protective of her six children, encouraging them to entertain themselves at home, never allowing them to have friends come over to the apartment. She feared that her children’s young playmates would use the time to case the joint and eventually come back to rob it. Though Darrell enjoyed dressing up and looking good, his mother avoided buying him or his siblings fancy jackets or bicycles, believing that having flashy things could make them targets for crime themselves. Perhaps more than anything, she wanted him to finish school. “I tried to talk to him,” she said. “I told him, ‘You have two strikes against you, you’re black and you’re poor, so you better get back to studying.’ I told him there’s more to life than hanging out in the streets. If only he had used a little common sense.” At the end of 1984, he was awaiting trial for armed robbery charges.
Shirley was the only parent at home, as Darrell’s father, a taxi driver, had been crushed to death in 1973 by his taxi in Queens while trying to fight off a carjacker. Shirley, a religious woman, prayed that Darrell would escape the neighborhood. Maybe one day he could make it north to the kind of leafy Hudson Valley town that was the final destination for the trains that they would watch zipping by their neighborhood without stopping.
Darrell’s friends described him as “laid back” and a “follower,” perhaps the kind of kid who would even be more prone than the others to go along with easy trouble as it presented itself. “He was staying outside a lot and I didn’t know what he was doing,” Cabey’s mother told The New York Times. “Knowing the situation out there and the area around here, I just should’ve known.”
In the subway car after Troy Canty approached Bernhard Goetz and asked for (or demanded) five dollars and Goetz began firing at the teens:
Cabey was in the rear of the car, either hiding or pretending to be wounded. One passenger said definitively that he saw Cabey seated and clutching a bench, with a look of terror on his face. After Goetz shot Ramseur, two bullets remained in the gun. Goetz fired them both. Though the sequence of how they were fired is unclear, within moments a panel on the train’s interior would end up with a bullet hole, and Cabey with a serious gunshot wound.
According to the police report as well as a statement Goetz made later, he thought he missed Cabey the first time he shot at him. Goetz then stood over Cabey and said, “You don’t look so bad. Here’s another,” then fired directly into his chest again. Goetz would go on to say, “I was so out of control, I would have put the barrel against his forehead and fired.” It is not clear for how long or even whether Goetz paused at that moment; several people in the car perceived that Goetz fired all of the shots in rapid succession, emptying his gun in less than two seconds, never pausing long enough to give a final message to Cabey. As Victor Flores said, “He just kept shooting until he didn’t have no more.”
Either way, there was a brief silence after Goetz was done shooting. After the final shot rang out, Canty said he could hear Darrell Cabey cry, “Why did he shoot me? Why did he shoot me?”
Five shots fired. Four men down.
Later in the hospital:
Darrell Cabey, though, was in bad shape. A bullet had entered his left side and ricocheted through his torso from left to right, its fragments puncturing both of his lungs. One severed his spinal cord, instantly paralyzing him from the abdomen down. Doctors inserted tubes to drain blood and fluid from his lungs (which by this point had partially collapsed). His condition spiraled as complications from his injuries compounded, each worsening the effects of the others. Given his paralysis, the muscles around his ribs couldn’t expand and contract normally, preventing him from breathing deeply or coughing or spitting as fluid filled his lungs. As a result, within days, he had developed significant pneumonia in both.
Three weeks later, Cabey went into respiratory arrest. While doctors were able to respond quickly enough with CPR to maintain his heartbeat, he had stopped breathing for about eight minutes. He eventually fell into a deep coma, slipping into critical condition and being kept alive via a respirator. Cabey was in a persistent vegetative state, and his eyes, when open, would rove when he was prodded. His upper extremities were tight, rigid, and spastic, all signs that the cortical level of his brain—which is involved in reasoning, emotion, thought, memory, language, and consciousness—had been irreversibly damaged from the lack of oxygen. The surgeon who operated on him did not think that he would survive.
One of his last actions before slipping into the coma was holding his mother Shirley’s hand, looking at her, and saying, “I’m sorry, Mom. I shouldn’t have been there.” The moment made devastatingly clear that any dreams of another life for her son were dashed. It would be another two months before he awakened, his mother still at his bedside. The Darrell Cabey who had existed before slipping into a coma was gone. Now, in addition to being a paraplegic, he had developed irreversible brain damage and had the mental capacity of a third-grader. He could propel a wheelchair but didn’t have much coordination beyond that. His speech was slurred, and he was unable to follow two back-to-back commands, copy a square, or write his own name. He had little recollection of the incident that got him in that condition in the first place, let alone what day of the week, month, or year it was.
The initial public reaction:
The victims’ bodies had barely made it to the hospital, but hysteria was starting to engulf the city and flood the world beyond it. The story hit television news later that day, and by the next morning, it had exploded. The public had barely any information beyond “subway,” “man,” “teenagers,” “mugging,” “gun,” “white,” and “black,” but for many, that was more than enough to turbocharge a wave of support for the shooter. Callers lit up switchboards at radio stations across the country to talk about crime; at one San Diego station, calls supporting the gunman outnumbered others 4 to 1. Newspaper columnists from across America’s racial and ideological spectrums found ripe new fodder for their essays. Politicians from far beyond New York’s five boroughs now felt it was their duty to opine with authority about a subway system they had never ridden. The NYPD’s tip line did not turn up any actionable leads, but instead brought hundreds of pats on the back for the gunman—“He did a great job,” “He should run for mayor,” “He did the right thing.” Within days, the mayor was flooded with 240 letters; of them, 237 backed the shooter. Man-in-the-street interviews showed kinship with the shooter coming from both white and black people. A New York Daily News tip line was inundated with calls of sympathy and praise, with one caller offering the shooter the Bronze Star he earned for valor in combat in World War II. “It’s scary on those trains,” the caller said. “Did you ever have a punk ask you for money on a train?” Without more details, a public narrative wrote itself: in an unsafe city, someone finally had the guts to do what needed to be done. To many, this guy wasn’t a violent criminal; he was Batman.