100 Objects #6: "Sharpened Screwdriver"

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0:47So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones, member SIPC. It's 1984. Ronald Reagan is president. MTV is just three years old. And it's the era of the Death Wish movies. This is the story of a man who decided to clean up the most violent town in the world. I said turn around. Hand me the money. If you've never seen the Death Wish movies, they follow the actor Charles Bronson as he goes on a shooting spree to, depending on the movie, avenge the murder of his wife or the murders of other ordinary New Yorkers who fall prey to the city's wildest, most violent criminals.

1:38The plot sort of doesn't matter in a weird way. This is historian Heather Ann Thompson, author of the new book Fear and Fury. What matters is that the audience is relating to this feeling of always unsettled when you leave your apartment or your home and that at any given moment, some young black or brown thug will cause you harm. The 80s were full of movies like this. Death Wish, The Exterminator, the Dirty Harry movies. This is kind of a glorified vigilante genre of media. Every man for himself, make sure you're armed. Take out any would-be assailant on your own. Make sure that you're protecting your family.

2:27And that every man for himself message resonated with people. All the movies came out in what was actually a very difficult moment in cities like New York. This is four years into the Reagan revolution. Cities have been stripped of a lot of their social resources and trash is piling up on the city streets. Muggings are up. The drug trade is up. The city is feeling dangerous. There is mainly a sense that nobody is doing anything about any of this. There is a real lack of understanding of why our city is feeling so under siege. Then in 1984, something tragic happens in New York City. A white man named Bernie Goetz, fed up with the crime and violence of the city, boards the subway and shoots four black teenagers.

3:24None of them have weapons. But as the story spreads and becomes a headline in papers across the city, it starts transforming into a fantasy pulled right out of Death Wish, complete with dangerous armed criminals.

3:41You know, they're not always necessarily going to have the gun, right? But they're going to have something. They're going to slash you with jagged glass, or they're going to whip out a tire iron. And in the Bernie Getz case, there's sort of a new version of this, which is that young teenagers in the city are carrying screwdrivers. Not just screwdrivers, sharpened screwdrivers, as in the normal tool transformed into a piercing deadly weapon. Only it was completely made up. The teens were not carrying sharpened screwdrivers or any other kind of weapon. That was the invention of this one moment in 1984.

4:27A sneaky new weapon and a powerful symbol. From 99 % Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars.

4:44Today, how the mythical sharpened screwdriver at the heart of the Bernie Gets shooting surfaced a new era of misinformation. and why it's still invoked as a justification for white vigilante violence today.

5:10Before the four teenagers in the Goetz case became known as sharpened screwdriver-wielding criminals, they were just four kids in the South Bronx. If New York was in bad shape, the South Bronx was in catastrophic shape. This is Elliott Williams, legal analyst and author of a book on Goetz called Five Bullets. The mid-1980s were a quite significant period of transition. Certainly, just about everything withdrew as the city tightened its belt. Firemen, police, sanitation workers, gone. Public schools were decimated. and stuck in the middle of that were four young men, Barry Allen, Daryl Cabe, Troy Candy, and James Ramsour.

5:51They were all between 18 and 19 years old and lived in a subsidized housing project called Claremont Village in the Bronx. Like Bernie, the four teenagers were soon to become famous, but we still actually don't know much about their lives. I tried to speak to all of the surviving young men. Two of the four are surviving. I tried very hard to speak to them. I got as close as speaking to two of Daryl Cabe's sisters for the book, but they did not want to be on the record or quoted in the book, and I respected that. Still, there are some small details we do know. We know they had siblings. We know James Remsior was a talented break dancer.

6:29We know that Barry Allen was a young father. We know Daryl Cabe ultimately is raised for most of his childhood by only his mother because his father, who had been working as a taxi driver, had been crushed by his own cab in a carjacking. And his mother very much wanted more for him, wanted him to get away from all of the pressures and troubles of the South Bronx to sort of find a better life. But at this point in 1984, none of them had been able to get away. So these are four kids who are hanging around essentially day after day and have no money, no jobs, no prospects, but who still, of course, want to go on a date, want to play a video game, want to be a teenager.

7:21And so they decide on December 22nd, 1984, that they're going to go into the city and they're going to go to a video arcade because video arcades had machines that you could take a screwdriver, jimmy open the receptacle, and you could get some quarters out of it. And in 1984, if you got a bunch of quarters, that was the difference between you being able to get something to eat, between you being able to imagine maybe taking your girlfriend to the movies. That was the difference between having a life and not having a life. But I will note, it was not that they were the sort of street gang who were out marauding or wilding or whatever else.

8:13This was a common act that teenagers did. I mean, this was the golden age of arcade games. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. These games were everywhere. You're talking liquor stores, bodegas, bowling alleys. It was painfully easy for someone with a long screwdriver and a little ingenuity to just pop it open and run away with all that money in it. And in many respects was cleaner or safer than mugging or robbing someone. It wasn't that police were likely to move heaven and earth to try to track down a kid with$80 of quarters in his pocket. And even if you got caught, you wouldn't go to jail for a long time.

8:52So three days before Christmas 1984, when the city is bustling and people are scrambling to get last-minute gifts, the four teenagers get on a train to go to an arcade downtown. They got on, they jumped the turnstile in the South Bronx, were goofing off. They were certainly doing pull-ups on the bars, walking around, asking people for cigarettes or for matches or whatever else. Meanwhile, Bertie Goetz in Manhattan, about 30 minutes south of the Bronx on the train, is about to leave his apartment. He's had a frustrating morning, and he decides that he's going to get on a train, and he's going to go down and potentially see some friends, maybe have a drink or two, but whatever, get out of the apartment.

9:37And so he leaves mid-afternoon to walk very nearby to the 14th Street station. He gets on the two train going downtown, and onto this one car there are these four teenagers.

9:55They were having a really good time. They are joking around. They're laughing. Back in the day, subways had these straps that hung down. And they were swinging on the straps and goofing around and talking to people. Hey, what's up? You got a light? And so Bernie gets sits down and decides to sit right across from them, which, you know, is noteworthy to the teens. because, of course, you know, nobody wants to sit next to teenagers. The train wasn't full, so Bernie Goetz didn't have to sit next to the teenagers. But he did. And one of them, who is really closest to him named Troy Canty, is sort of interested in this.

10:37And he says, hey, you know, he greets him. And Bernie Goetz kind of gruffly, you know, so, you know, hey, responds back. And he's kind of encouraged. And he's encouraged in particular to ask this guy, does he have five dollars? So that was not a particularly weird thing for Troy Canty to say, hey, have you got five bucks? This is the 80s and panhandling is the name of the game. You can't go anywhere in New York City in 1984 without somebody saying, hey, you got a dollar, you got five bucks. But Bernie doesn't like that. Bernie gets stands up. He slowly turns. And in that moment, Troy Canty sort of thinks, wow, this guy's actually going to give me five bucks.

11:21But what happens is Bernie Getz stands up, reaches into the waistband of his slacks, and what he has there is a hidden holster. What Troy didn't know was that Bernie Getz routinely carried guns. And in New York, that was illegal to just carry a gun because you wanted to. So he'd actually purchased his guns illegally because he'd gone down to Florida and purchased them and brought them back. So Bernie has one of those illegal guns on him. A.38 Smith & Wesson. And now he pulls it out on the train. He swings around, assumes a combat position, and shoots Troy Canty front on, straight in the chest.

12:04And immediately right behind Troy is his friend Barry Allen, who's not said a word to Bernie Getz. He horrified, tries to get away, tries to run. And Bernie Getz shoots him in the back. And then their friend, James Ramzor, who's even further down the train, who's also said nothing to Bernie Getz, he shoots him as he's trying to get away in the arm. It goes through his side and ultimately into his lungs. Now three of the four teens are on the floor of the train, bleeding. Troy Canty from a bullet to the chest. Barry Allen from a bullet to the back. James Ramzor from a bullet to his arm and side.

12:44Bernie also fires at the fourth teen, Daryl Cabe, and misses. Shaking, KB sits down in the rear of the car, head down, and grips the edge of a seat, hoping that Bernie will just move on. And when Bernie Getz walks over to this fourth teenager, Daryl KB, he looks down at him and he says, you look OK. Here's another. And that's when he puts a gun straight in his side, pulls the trigger, thus severing his spinal cord and rendering him paralyzed for the rest of his life. While this is all happening, the conductor pulls the emergency brake and the train comes to a halt. So the train is stopped on the tracks in the darkness somewhere between 14th Street and Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan.

13:37Now, at that moment, Gets appeared calm to passengers and appeared almost poised. But he ultimately, knowing that the train would be swarmed with police in a matter of moments, just fled. jumped off the train, ran through the subway platform with his gun, took a cab home, rented a car, and fled to New Hampshire.

14:03The boys are hoisted out of the train and rushed to the hospital. All four were badly wounded, but Daryl Cabe is the worst off, in a coma with a bullet in his spinal cord. He and Barry Allen are hurried into the operating room. And meanwhile, back on the train, the police are trying to make sense of what in the world just happened. And so what are they left with? They're left with the clothing of the boys who have been stripped so that they can be attended to medically. And the police discover that in the pockets of two of these young men, in particular, it was Daryl K.B. and James Ramzor, that they have screwdrivers.

14:42And initially, when they pull these screwdrivers out and they note them, they catalog them. There had been no reason to think they'd ever been taken out. They were secured in their jackets. And that was kind of the end of it. The police log the screwdrivers, but they don't think of them as relevant yet. Meanwhile, the whole system begins to mobilize to figure out what the boys could have done to justify the shooting. They're casting about, combing the records to figure out what in the world record must these teenagers have? Because surely they must be criminals. Surely they must be responsible for the fact that they themselves now have bullet holes in them.

15:25And they quickly realized that these teenagers have racked up a series of misdemeanor citations over the previous years. They'd been caught jumping the turnstile to avoid paying the subway fare and trying to steal quarters from an arcade. All the citations were minor. If it weren't for the Getz case, none of those charges would ever bring them to court. But within a very short period of time, two Bronx judges make the executive decision that they're going to suddenly issue a blizzard of warrants for these teenagers' arrest. Meanwhile, the police are looking for Bernie so they can question him, too.

16:09The search goes on today for the so-called subway vigilante. But already, the public isn't even sure the police should be doing that. Police reported receiving more than 500 calls praising the man who shot the teenagers. Bernie Getz is celebrated by ordinary people. They champion him. They decide that he's innocent even before they know his name. They are furious that the DA's office will even consider prosecuting him. Before Bernard Getz was identified, the New York Post started calling him the, quote, death wish vigilante. That's the nickname they gave him. And they started running graphics about the Death Wish vigilante after Charles Bronson, the protagonist of the movie Death Wish.

16:57So long before Bernie Getz had pulled that trigger, they were already really being primed with this rhetoric to identify with Bernie Getz. Bernie Getz, he's just minding his own business. He's a hardworking guy. He's a small business owner. Bernie was a regular guy. You know what I mean? He's a regular guy. There's no big thing about him, you know. And he gets on that train and four black thugs are going to try to harm him. And so that's all they need to know, right? Gets bit the people of the city of New York a great favor. If it was me, I would have killed the guy. I mean, if it was me and I had to defend myself, I would have done exactly the same thing.

17:35I think you did right. They tried to mug him. They're my kids. They're monsters. But there's one detail in this story, one piece of misinformation that really started to stand out. And it had to do with those screwdrivers. Police say the teenagers had arrest records and three were carrying long screwdrivers. Police say the boys were armed with sharpened screwdrivers. Now the media was reporting that even though the boys didn't have guns, they had weapons in the form of screwdrivers. And not just screwdrivers, sharpened ones. These were not sharpened screwdrivers. These were regular screwdrivers that they needed to jimmy open the coin receptacles at the local arcade.

18:18And it's not just the use of the sharpened screwdrivers, but the use of the term armed. The narrative that the four young men were armed with screwdrivers is itself a fiction. There was never any screwdriver shown to brandish or made available to Bernard Getz at any time. It is simply not true. But that didn't matter. After the New York Daily News reported it, its tabloid competitor, the New York Post, doubled down. Every major paper ran with this notion that the screwdrivers were sharpened. Police say they did find several sharpened screwdrivers in the coat pockets of the victim. According to police, carried sharpened, heavy-duty screwdrivers.

19:07And each time another news story mentioned it. it became more and more real. Four black teenagers wielding sharpened screwdrivers pressed him for$5. Eventually, even major mainstream publications like the New York Times and Time magazine ran with this detail. All you knew was a white guy that had shot four black teenagers who were armed with sharpened screwdrivers. And that stuck and it taps into a long-running narrative in the United States over lifting up vigilantes and vigilante behavior.

19:42Still, even as these new stories are circulating, there's a big piece of the puzzle missing. Bernie, who had been on the lam for nine days, still needed to be questioned. And he was about to finally emerge and give his own version of events.

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23:53That's quince.com slash invisible for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash invisible. After nine days of traipsing around the snowy back roads of Vermont and New Hampshire, Bernie Goetz finally decides to turn himself in. He walks into the police station in Concord, New Hampshire, and starts talking. Mr. Goetz, this is all on videotape. Sure. Nothing that's said in this room is off the videotape. It's for your protection and for ours. When he turns himself in, he voluntarily waives his right to a lawyer. and he proceeds to give a two-hour videotaped confession. And in that, he pulls no punches.

24:38I wanted to kill those guys. I wanted to maim those guys. I wanted to make them sucker in every way I could. If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets and I was going to gouge one of the guy's eyes out with my keys afterwards. He makes clear that robbery had nothing to do with it. Look, they don't have weapons. And he says this a few times, even when the DA, you know, clearly mystified as to why he would have done this. It's almost like people are throwing him a lifeline. Well, you know, is it because you were mugged, you know, a few years earlier?

25:16He says, no, it had nothing to do with that. You know, were you being robbed? And he says, no. He even admits to going up to Daryl Cavy, who was cowering in his seat, and saying a line that shocks me every time I hear it. When I saw this one fellow, when I saw the gleam in his eye and the smile on his face, I went to him the second time. And I looked at him. And I said, you seem to be doing all right. Here's another.