Bernie Hugo Goetz born 1947, in Queens, New York, a self-employed electrical engineer; dubbed by the New York press as the "Subway Vigilante, after shoting four young men on the Seventh Avenue #2 express subway train in Manhattan in 1984. Goetz found himself in the same car with four black teenagers, when Canty (one of the young men) told Goetz to give him five dollars. Goetz stood up, drew a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver from under his blue windbreaker, and began shooting. All four youths were wounded, two of them critically.

Goetz was able to slip away after the shooting at the Chambers Street Station where he rented a car and drove to Bennington, Vermont. Where he then disposed of the gun and jacket in the woods. One week later, he turn himself in at the New Hampshire police station, he became a national celebrity by this time.

Following a seven-week trial in mid-1987, a jury found Goetz not guilty on 17 counts of attempted murder and assault. The jury based its conclusion on what a "reasonable person" would have done under the circumstances. In their view Goetz had acted reasonably, especially since he had been mugged before.

When the verdict was announced the audience applauded, the Guardian Angles protected him from the crowd that gather outside the courthouse. NAACP director Benjamin L. Hooks called it a "grave miscarriage of justice." Others complained that if Goetz had been black and his victims white the trial result would have been altogether different.