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1984 NYC Subway shootings... black teenagers...
1984 NYC Subway shootings... black teenagers...
Item # 725092
December 24, 1984
USA TODAY, Dec. 24-25, 1984
* New York City Subway shooting
* Bernhard Goetz vigilante shootings
* 4 African American - black teenagers
* Self-defense or racism arguments ?
Page 3 has a one column heading:"NYC subway adds police after shootings" (see images) Not known at the time, Goetz would turn himself in nine days later.
Complete with all sections (28 pages), very nice condition.
background: The 1984 Subway Vigilante case remains a haunting symbol of a New York City era defined by crumbling infrastructure and rampant urban crime. In December, Bernhard Goetz, a thin and unassuming electrical engineer, fundamentally altered the national conversation on self-defense when he drew an unlicensed .38-caliber revolver and shot four Black teenagers—Barry Allen, Troy Canty, Darrell Cabey, and James Ramseur—after they allegedly accosted him for money on a downtown 2 train. While Goetz claimed he acted out of a "self-preservation" instinct born from a previous traumatic mugging, the clinical coldness of the shooting, particularly his decision to fire a second, paralyzing shot into Darrell Cabey while saying, "You don't look so bad, here's another," turned him into a polarizing figure of near-mythic proportions. To a frustrated public, he was a folk hero who had finally fought back against the "thugs" of the underground; to others, he was a dangerous racist who had bypassed the rule of law to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Though he was eventually acquitted of attempted murder in 1987—serving time only for a weapons charge—the subsequent 1996 civil trial resulted in a $43 million judgment against him, cementing the incident as a permanent, fractured Rorschach test for American attitudes toward race, vigilantism, and the limits of lethal force.
Category: The 20th Century
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