The Saturday
afternoon before
Christmas in 1984, on a New York City subway car making its run
downtown, two black teenagers approached Bernhard Goetz. One of
the teens said to Goetz, "Give
me five dollars." Seconds later, Goetz fired five shots from his
Smith & Wesson revolver and four young men were injured--one with a
severed spinal cord. When the train came to a screeching halt,
Goetz unfastened a safety chain, jumped to the tracks below, and
disappeared into the darkness of the subway tunnel. City
newspapers quickly dubbed the gunman "the subway vigilante."
