Posted on 12/16/2004 12:19:40 PM PST by JZelle
NEW YORK (AP) -- Twenty years after the Barnhard Goetz subway shooting ignited a national furor over racism, gun control, crime and vigilante justice, New York is a far different place, and the sensational case now exists mostly as an artifact from another era.
On Dec. 22, 1984, Goetz, a meek-looking white man, rose from his seat on the No. 2 train, and shot four black youths, sparking a national outrage.
Many who were involve in the case say it's difficult to imagine a repeat of such an episode in today's New York.
"Could it happen now?" asked attorney Ron Kuby, who won a $43 million lawsuit against Goetz on behalf of paralyzed victim Darrell Cabey. "Inconceivable. Inconceivable that the attack would take place. Inconceivable that the attacker would be hailed as a hero."
Former New York chief of detectives Richard Nicastro, whose officers tracked Goetz down in New Hampshire nine days after the shootings, echoed Kuby's feelings.
"It's hard to imagine it happening again," said Nicastro, who retired in 1986. "What it showed was the fear most people had in traveling about."
At the time, there were 15,000 felonies a year on average in the subway - more than 40 every day around the nation's largest mass transit system. Twenty years later, there were just 2,760 felonies reported through Nov. 14 - barely eight per day. Murders in the subways, which topped out at 26 in 1990, are at zero for the year.
Subway ridership is at about 4.5 million riders daily; back then, the number of straphangers was in freefall, with one out of every four passengers abandoning the subways between 1965 and 1982. In 1984, ridership was at about 2.7 million per day.
Back then, the subways were covered in graffiti and inhabited by muggers, junkies, panhandlers, the homeless. The cost of admission was a mere 90 cents for a ride scarier than anything at Six Flags.
Track fires and train breakdowns became standard fare. But it was out-of-control crime in filthy trains and frightening stations that inflicted the heaviest wounds to the city psyche.
"The subways are everybody's second neighborhood," said Thomas Reppetto, a police historian who heads the Citizens Crime Commission. "If you live in Brooklyn, and see a story about a robbery in the Bronx, you think, `Gee, that's terrible.' But if there's a story about a robbery in the subway, you think, `Whoa. I ride down there.'"
One of those riders was Goetz, who brought a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38-caliber gun with him when he boarded a train shortly after 5 p.m. on a Saturday. The four youths had boarded the train in the Bronx, carrying sharpened screwdrivers.
"Give me five dollars," said Troy Canty, one of the four, as he approached the thin, bespectacled passenger. Goetz pulled his illegal weapon just north of the World Trade Center and began shooting.
"You don't look so bad," he told a wounded Cabey. "Here's another."
Goetz later said he never set foot on the subway again after that day.
He was cleared of attempted murder in 1987 but spent more than eight months in jail for a weapons conviction in the case. In 1996, a jury awarded Cabey $43 million.
The Cabey family never received one cent from Goetz, and Cabey remains in a wheelchair - "in a perpetual state of being an 8-year-old," Kuby said.
Goetz, a reluctant celebrity at best, slipped into obscurity and resurfaced infrequently: He mounted a doomed 2001 campaign for mayor. Recently, Goetz filmed scenes for a low-budget horror movie called "Silver Night," in which he plays a nutritionist to vampires, and uses a gun.
He has rarely spoken about the shootings, and attempts to reach him for this story were unsuccessful.
The self-employed electronics calibrator lives in the same Greenwich Village apartment where he has resided for decades. His most recent cause was the redevelopment of ground zero; Goetz recently wrote former Mayor Ed Koch about his opposition to the design for the new Freedom Tower.
"I wrote him back, `Bernie, the train has already left the station,'" Koch said.
Notice that Kuby doesn't allege that the crime couldn't happen again. Just that the victim wouldn't dare fight back.
All this talk about a changed city but, strangely enough, the name "Giuliani" isn't mentioned once. ;)
I know. It went by fast.
I happened to be living in NYC at the time, and walked by him on the street one morning. He is physically very slight of build.
I won't say everything he did was justified, but I'm sure he would be an easy mark to intimidate on the subway back during those "Death Wish" days . . .
Nickel-Plated .38 Pendulum Swing bump!
"The Cabey family never received one cent from Goetz, and Cabey remains in a wheelchair - "in a perpetual state of being an 8-year-old," Kuby said. "
Hard to conjure up any sympathy for them.
Wonder if there will be a story on the Tawana Brawley anniversary that mentions Rev. Al still hasn't paid up on his judgement????
Justice NYC style. The crook gets awarded the money from the guy who defended himself.
The Cabey family never received one cent from Goetz, and Cabey remains in a wheelchair - "in a perpetual state of being an 8-year-old," Kuby said.
which is exactly what they should have received. I notice this bit of anti-selfdefense propaganda didn't mention the other thugs fates. As I understand it they were all killed in prison or in the comission of crimes. Only Caby's being confined to a wheelchair kept him from a further life of crime. If only there were some appropriate justicy for scum Kuby. He and John Edwards are two of a kind.
NYC is a different town. It can be governed, and Guiliani helped prove it.
The four youths had boarded the train in the Bronx, carrying sharpened screwdrivers.
Goetz pulled his illegal weapon. But carrying sharpened screwdrivers is okay?
That was back in the days when most of Manhattan, except for certain well-to-do enclaves, was very dangerous after dark.
A few months before this happened I was on the subway with my dad and at 4:00 on a Wednesday afternoon, with hundreds of people standing around doing nothing, three crackheads were using a tire-iron to pry open subway turnstiles to extra tokens.
My father called for the booth attendant to call the cops and she said "I already did. They'll be gone before the cops get here."
And she was right. One of them even stopped to threaten my dad for saying something.
The Goetz affair filled me with sheer joy. The only one of those thugs who did not go on to commit more violent felonies was the one he put in a wheelchair.
One of his "victims" was later arrested for beating and raping a 69 year old woman.
Apparently in NYC it's OK as long as you are black and rob a white. After all Goetz was the one who went to prison for this incident, not the thugs.
Something is missing from this account that I can't quite put my finger on...
My liberal sister-in-law served on the grand jury that indicted Goetz. I wonder how she'd feel if she had been the one "asked" for money on the subway. Then again, she commutes from the suburbs in her Volvo, so I guess she'll never have to worry about it.
The left can blame Goetz all they want, but if Spanky there never pulls the screwdriver and tries to commit a crime, he doesn't get hurt.
Kinda funny that he sits side by side with Curtis Sliwa of the vigilante group "Guardian Angels" as the resident mad liberal nut lawyer on WABC.
I believe one of them raped a pregnant woman on a rooftop. She needed many stitches to sew up her anus afterward. One thing you have to give Bernie, he did not hit the wrong people.
Was she a suburbanite then? How did she get on a New York County grand jury if she wasn't a Manhattanite?
Kuby, the same rotten dirt bag as ever.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.