It was more than 38 years ago that Bernhard Goetz became briefly famous for all the wrong reasons.
He was riding on a New York City subway when four African-American youths confronted him and asked him for money. Goetz pulled a gun out of his pocket and shot all four of the youths.
For a short time, he became America’s most famous vigilante. He was arrested and charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment and various firearms charges. A jury convicted him of one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm and he served eight months of a one-year sentence.
Goetz became a hero to the far right in an era when crime was rampant in NYC.
It was December 22, 1984, when Goetz gained a fame he never really wanted. Ronald Reagan had just been re-elected president, and “Beverly Hills Cop” was the big hit movie. I wasn’t aware of much in the news that weekend. I flew into Columbus, Ohio, that day to cover a basketball game between Missouri and Ohio State and I flew to Buffalo the next day to cover a hockey game between St. Louis and the Buffalo Sabres.
My son Virgile will be 39 on his next birthday, but December 1984 was the month before he was born.
Nearly half of the people in the United States had yet to be born and millions more were too young to remember anything about 1984. Memories of 1984 from the present would be the same as memories of 1945 for those living in 1984.
But now we have our own subway vigilante Just this month in NYC, a 24-year-old Marine veteran put a 30-year-old African-American man in what turned out to be a fatal chokehold while riding in the subway. Jordan Neely boarded the train and began acting aggressively, shouting that he was hungry and wanted food, saying he didn’t care if he had to go to jail.
Ordinarily I would embed a YouTube video here, but the ones available are restricted and van only be watched on the site. They show Daniel Penny and two other men holding Neely down, something that supposedly went on for 15 minutes.
As you might guess from the picture, a big party of Neely’s life was trying to be a Michael Jackson impersonator. He apparently had a reputation for forcing himself on people panhandling. If there is a scandal in it, it’s apparently that Penny was initially arrested but then released without any charges being filed.
Penny later was charged with second-degree manslaughter, and not surprisingly at all, he has become something of a hero to the MAGA crowd. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis even compared him to the Good Samaritan from the Bible, who I never realized had stopped to help and helped bu the victim out of his misery by choking him to death.
Certainly the fact that it was a white man who killed a black man heightens the political drama. Imagine if it had been an African-American Marine veteran who had killed a white Elvis impersonator by applying a choke hold. I would bet his chances of getting off the train alive would have maxed out at 50-50.
DeSantis and the Trumpanzees certainly wouldn’t have compared him to a figure out of the Bible, unless it was Cain.
Or maybe the guy who looked at his father Noah naked and drunk.
It’s the people like Goetz and Penny who give the wannabes a chance to live vicariously.
Donald Trump too.
Hey, they’ve got to have some fun.