LISTEN: The Subway Vigilante Who Never Left

“Would they cheer so loudly if it was a white kid shot? I don’t think so. Would he have shot four white kids? I don’t think so.… 

Is there a racial edge to this? That’s all there is. Somebody asked me, ‘Is it beneath the surface a racial thing?’

Beneath the surface?! I mean, it’s up in the sky.”

https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2616688.rss?goetz

When a white man shot four Black teens inside a subway car before disappearing into a tunnel just before Christmas Eve in 1984, young reporter Jon Kalish was assigned to the story by NPR. 

When Bernhard Goetz turned himself on New Year’s Eve, confessing that “I wanted to waste them all,” what came next seemed clear to Kalish. 

Instead, the Manhattan district attorney struggled to even indict Goetz before  a jury eventually acquitted him of all charges except for possession of an unlicensed gun. 

Four decades later, Kalish looks back on a shooting that left a wound that  never fully healed, by a shooter who still lives here, and how it was covered at the time — with “the celebration of a man with an illegal .38‑caliber revolver firing it again and again on a crowded train.”

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