Fear and Fury

Heather Ann Thompson argues that the 1984 subway shootings carried out by Bernhard "Bernie" Goetz, a white New York City resident, against four unarmed Black teenagers from the South Bronx were not an isolated act of violence but the product of political, economic, and media forces unleashed during the Reagan era. These forces, she contends, stoked white racial resentment to serve the interests of the wealthy, and the shootings' legal aftermath legitimized vigilante violence whose consequences persist into the present.

The book opens with a dual portrait set on December 22, 1984. Nineteen-year-old Darrell Cabey sits on a downtown subway car with friends Troy Canty, Barry Allen, and James Ramseur when a slight white man opens fire. Darrell cannot move. Goetz flees through the tunnel, takes a cab home, and drives out of the city. Within hours, the tabloid press dubs him the "Death Wish Vigilante," and public adulation begins.

Before detailing the shooting, the book traces its central figures' converging histories. Darrell grew up in the South Bronx, a neighborhood once considered a jewel of New York City but by the 1980s devastated by white flight, the Cross Bronx Expressway's displacement of tens of thousands of residents, an arson epidemic driven by landlords seeking insurance payouts, and a fiscal crisis that stripped the area of jobs and services. When Darrell was seven, his father was killed trying to stop a thief. His widowed mother, Shirley, moved the family into public housing. Reagan-era budget cuts then eliminated summer employment, after-school programs, and school counselors. Darrell dropped out of school at seventeen and drifted in a neighborhood where the crack trade had become one of the few remaining sources of income.

Goetz, born in 1947 to German immigrant parents, grew up dominated by a father later convicted of sexually molesting teenage boys. Bullied and isolated, he was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, earned an engineering degree from New York University, and settled into a solitary life running an electronics business from his Greenwich Village apartment. After a disputed 1981 subway incident in which he was accosted by three young people, he applied for a pistol permit, was denied, and began illegally purchasing guns. At a tenants association meeting, he declared that the neighborhood's problems were caused by Black and Hispanic people. He pulled his gun on strangers on at least two occasions before the subway shooting.

Thompson argues that this individual rage was cultivated by broader forces. The Reagan administration slashed the top income tax rate from 70 to 28 percent while gutting social programs under "trickle-down" theory. The devastation in communities like the South Bronx, combined with an escalating War on Drugs, fueled mass incarceration that fell disproportionately on Black and Brown Americans. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who purchased the New York Post in 1976, moved the paper rightward with sensationalized, racially coded crime coverage. Popular culture reinforced vigilante fantasies through films like Death Wish and Dirty Harry.

On the day of the shooting, the four teens boarded the 2 train carrying screwdrivers to pry open arcade machines for quarters. Canty approached Goetz and asked for five dollars. Goetz stood, assumed a combat stance, and opened fire with hollow point ammunition, which is illegal in New York City and prohibited in warfare by international treaty. He shot Canty in the chest, Allen in the back as Allen fled, and Ramseur in the arm. He then approached Cabey, who sat gripping the bench in terror, told him, "You don't look too bad, here's another," and fired again. The bullet severed Cabey's spinal cord. He would never walk again.

The tabloid press cast the teens as criminals and Goetz as a hero, falsely reporting that the boys carried "sharpened screwdrivers." Judges issued bench warrants against the hospitalized teens for accumulated misdemeanors. Death threats flooded the families' homes. Polls showed nearly half of New Yorkers considered Goetz's actions justified.

When Goetz surrendered to police in Concord, New Hampshire, nine days later, he admitted on tape that he did not feel threatened, knew the boys had no weapons, and intended to kill them all. Despite these confessions, a first grand jury returned only minor weapons charges, partly because the District Attorney's office had not immunized the teen victims to testify.

Public outcry, particularly from Black community leaders and civil rights lawyers C. Vernon Mason and Rev. Al Sharpton, led to a second grand jury. With Troy Canty's immunized testimony, serious charges were returned, including four counts of attempted murder. Defense attorney Barry Slotnick mounted an aggressive campaign: He displayed menacing photographs of the teens, staged courtroom reenactments using members of the Guardian Angels, a civilian subway patrol group, as stand-ins, and took the jury to an actual subway car at the Chambers Street station. He argued that Goetz's confession was unreliable, the product of a traumatized man on "automatic pilot." Prosecutor Gregory Waples countered with eyewitness testimony and Goetz's own recorded words, at one point donning Cabey's bloodied jacket to demonstrate bullet trajectories.

On June 16, 1987, the mostly white jury acquitted Goetz of all attempted murder and assault charges, convicting him only of illegal weapons possession. Juror Mark Lesly later revealed that jurors identified with Goetz rather than his victims and discounted his confession as post-traumatic embellishment. Goetz served approximately eight months in jail.

In January 1985, Cabey went into respiratory arrest and slipped into a coma. He emerged with severe, permanent brain damage. Shirley Cabey filed a $50 million civil suit, but the case stalled until after the criminal trial. In a 1990 deposition, Goetz confirmed under oath that he had deliberately walked up to Cabey and shot him again. The civil trial took place in April 1996. Attorney Ron Kuby, who assumed the case after lead attorney William Kunstler's death in 1995, called Goetz as his first witness. On the stand, Goetz said Shirley Cabey should have had an abortion and called the shooting a public service. A jury of four Black and two Latino members deliberated less than five hours before awarding $43 million in damages. Goetz filed for bankruptcy. The Cabey family never collected any money.

The book's final section traces the arc from the Goetz case to the present. Thompson argues that Murdoch's launch of Fox News in 1996 extended to a national audience the racially coded messaging the Post had pioneered. She chronicles how Giuliani's "Broken Windows" policing, which aggressively targeted minor offenses, and Clinton's 1994 crime bill escalated mass incarceration. Stand Your Ground laws, which remove a person's duty to retreat before using lethal force, proliferated after Florida's 2005 statute. The acquittals of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin and Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two anti-racist protesters followed a template, Thompson argues, that the Goetz case helped establish. Donald Trump's presidency, built on Murdoch's media playbook of sensationalism and racial resentment, further normalized vigilante violence.

The book closes with the fates of Goetz's victims. Troy Canty completed drug rehabilitation and disappeared from public life. Barry Allen cycled through prison and addiction and died within a decade of his final release. James Ramseur spent 25 years in prison; 17 months after his release, he died by suicide in a Bronx hotel on the 27th anniversary of the shooting. Shirley Cabey died in 2015. Darrell remains in a care facility, still in his wheelchair. On December 9, 2024, a jury acquitted Daniel Penny, a white military veteran, of negligent homicide for choking unhoused Black street performer Jordan Neely to death on a New York City subway. Trump invited Penny to the Army-Navy football game. Thompson concludes that the Reagan Revolution's dismantling of public investment, the deliberate stoking of white racial resentment, and the legal legitimization of vigilante violence have placed American democracy in grave danger, but ordinary people have always resisted and have every reason to continue.