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Bernhard Goetz, then a 37-year-old electronics technician, defended himself from a group of would-be robbers on a New York City subway car Dec. 22, 1984.
Four decades later, another New York straphanger argued self-defense to beat homicide charges in another Big Apple subway vigilante case.
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In May 2023, Daniel Penny, a 26-year-old Marine veteran who was studying architecture at a New York college, placed 30-year-old Jordan Neely in a headlock to stop a violent outburst that frightened passengers and involved threats about killing them and going to prison for life.
Jurors found Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide earlier this month after prosecutors asked the judge to dismiss the most serious charge of manslaughter.
DANIEL PENNY FOUND NOT GUILTY IN SUBWAY CHOKEHOLD TRIAL
Bernhard Goetz, who shot four youths on a crowded subway because he felt he was about to be robbed, was cleared of all attempted murder charges. He was convicted on only one of 13 counts, third-degree weapons possession.(Bettmann via Getty images)
The trials of Goetz and Penny were both highly politicized and scrutinized because of the subjects’ races. Goetz and Penny are both White. Neely and the four men Goetz shot are Black. Legal scholars have spent years discussing whether Goetz would have shot White teens under similar circumstances. Penny’s defense repeatedly accused prosecutors of trying to unfairly inject racial undertones into a trial that did not involve hate crime charges.
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Both cases also reflect deeply held public sentiment that crime was getting out of control in New York City. Goetz had been mugged multiple times in the past, which is why he said he was carrying a handgun. Penny put Neely in a chokehold after a spate of subway incidents involving mentally ill homeless people attacking passengers, telling police, “These guys are pushing people in front of trains and stuff.”
Violent crime dropped dramatically in New York City in the late 1990s and 2000s, but some crimes, robberies in particular, have risen again after a wave of anti-police rioting in 2020 and left-wing political movement to “defund the police.”
KYLE RITTENHOUSE TRIAL ‘A SHAM AT BEST,’ SUBWAY VIGILANTE BERNIE GOETZ SAYS: ‘SATISFY A MOB’
Daniel Penny returns to the courtroom after a break during his trial in Manhattan Criminal Court Dec. 3, 2024, in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Goetz was acquitted on attempted murder charges but spent 8½ months in jail for possessing the handgun he used to defend himself without a license.
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The case involved four teens — Darrell Cabey, James Ramseur, Troy Canty and Barry Allen. The first two were armed with sharpened screwdrivers, which they claimed were not weapons but tools to break into coin boxes in arcade games, according to court records.
They got on a Manhattan-bound No. 2 train in the Bronx and surrounded Goetz after he boarded at the 14th Street station in Manhattan and sat down by himself.
Goetz had an unlicensed .38-caliber pistol in his belt loaded with five rounds.
Bernhard Goetz leaves the courthouse.(Rick Maiman/Sygma via Getty Images)
The teens approached Goetz, and without displaying any weapons, Canty told him, “Give me $5.”
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Rather than being robbed, Goetz pulled out the gun and fired four shots – striking Canty in the chest and Allen in the back. Another round went through Ramseur’s arm and into his side. The fourth shot missed Cabey. Goetz waited a moment, then fired his last shot at Cabey, severing his spinal cord and leaving him paralyzed.
WATCH ‘SCANDALOUS: THE SUBWAY VIGILANTE’ ON FOX NATION
A No. 2 train subway car in the aftermath of the Bernhard Goetz shooting at Manhattan’s Chambers Street Station Dec. 22, 1984.(Carmine Donofrio/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
“I said, ‘You seem to be all right, here’s another,’” Goetz later told detectives. “If I was a little more under self-control … I would have put the barrel against his forehead and fired.”
He added that if he’d been carrying more bullets, he would have kept shooting.
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The conductor stopped the train and radioed police. Goetz jumped off the train and fled on foot.
STREAM DANIEL PENNY’S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW ON FOX NATION
Screenshot from bystander video showing Jordan Neely being held in a chokehold on the New York City subway.(Luces de Nueva York/Juan Alberto Vazquez via Storyful)
The case sparked a media frenzy, and Goetz surrendered to police in Concord, New Hampshire, nine days later. He told them he’d been illegally carrying a pistol since 1981, when he had been “maimed” during a prior mugging. He also said that, on multiple occasions, he’d warded off other would-be robbers by brandishing the weapon and not firing.
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Because of those prior attacks, he said, he knew the teens on the train wanted to rob him based on their behavior and the looks on their faces. Before the case went to trial, at least two of the teens reportedly admitted they were going to rob him, but a court considered those statements hearsay.
Goetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
The Trump administration’s accusation that Boston’s housing policies discriminate against white residents is part of a disturbing pattern (“US to investigate Boston for bias,” Page A1, Dec. 13). This is no mere policy debate. It is a calculated attempt by conservatives to whitewash history. They hope that if the past can be obliterated, then present-day racial inequality can be repackaged as something that never even existed.
For centuries, Black Americans have been subjected to legally enforced discrimination in housing, education, employment, lending, and voting, atop generations of enslavement. These evils shaped who accumulated wealth and opportunity and who did not. The Civil Rights Act made discriminatory practices illegal, but it did not erase the advantages and disadvantages those systems had already created. That’s why policies such as Boston’s were conceived — not as rewards or punishments but rather as pragmatic efforts to narrow gaps that were deliberately built.
Opposition to these programs is an attack on history and truth itself. Limiting what can be talked about in schools, removing displays honoring the struggles of Black Americans, taking Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth off of the calendar of fee-free days at national parks — these are all part of a coordinated and cynical strategy to foster ignorance in America. This scheme allows the Trump team to attack programs such as Boston’s or any DEI policy and call it a defense of fairness and neutrality. It’s another Big Lie.
For this president and the movement he leads, ignorance is no longer a mere failure of politics. It is the whole point.
