Blood On the Tracks

Penn Station houses many small places where weary commuters can purchase alcohol for their journey of the damned back to Long Island. Beer vendors even perch on the concrete platforms adjacent to the tracks, thus proving a demand for twelve ounces of relaxation after working in the Unreal City. The 5:33 train bound for points east is a particularly crowded ride where harried passengers can forget about The Horror, and perhaps focus upon a more promising existence, far from the mighty harangue of their cubicle-strewn jobs. Maybe the gentleman studying his laptop is planning the perfect birthday gift for his wife, or a bedraggled secretary who quietly closes Grisham begins seriously considering those law school night classes. On one such hopeful ride back home in December, 1993, tired travelers were brutally peppered with twenty-nine rounds of Black Talon bullets fired from Colin Ferguson’s angry 9-mm. pistol, an attack that wounded nineteen people and left the future plans of six suburbanites dead on the floor.

Then arrived the overwhelming question: Why would he do this? Before the articles in Psychology Today, or Tom Brokaw interviewing the head of NYU’s Sociology Department, came the lawyers. Ferguson’s famed attorneys, William Kuntsler and Ronald Kuby, asserted that his rampage was an insanity resulting from “Black Rage,” a condition developed after years of living in a society hostile to African-Americans. Such an unhospitable environment twisted Ferguson’s thought processes, inexorably leading him to spray the Long Island Railroad’s #3 car with ammunition while shouting, “You’re gonna get it!” Ferguson opted against an insanity plea, and instead insisted that he was a victim of racial biasing from the passengers. Although more than fifty eyewitnesses saw him open-fire, Ferguson claimed that he was asleep when the shootings began, therefore somebody else committed the murders. Much to the surprise of his attorneys, Colin Ferguson exercised his sixth amendment right and defended himself in court claiming, “This is a case of stereotype victimization of the Black man.”

Counselor Ferguson’s defense strategies were slightly less plausible than Charles Manson’s Helter-Skelter philosophies. A particularly interesting legal trump card was Ferguson’s theory that the reason for 93 counts in his indictment was only because it matched the year 1993. He also compared himself to John the Baptist, a spiritual ancestor who, like Ferguson, was demonized and slaughtered by duplicitous tyrants. Such legal tactics are somewhat dubious, but Colin has six life sentences worth of time to clarify them for us.

Although Ferguson’s remorseless murder spree and subsequent courtroom antics revealed him as a dangerous psychopath, some people hailed him as a Black divinity who finally sought revenge on Whitey. In a speech before 2,000 spectators at Howard University, former Nation of Islam flack Kalid Muhammed drew thunderous applause when he shouted, “I love Colin Ferguson who killed all those White folks on the Long Island train…God spoke to Colin Ferguson.” Occasional music personality Wyclef Jean sang of Ferguson as “the vigilante” and his victims as “civilians running for their life, like the Devil on Judgment Night running from Christ.” Maybe Colin can write him a song. The message was clear: White boys have plenty of murderous icons; now here’s one for us.

Extolling Ferguson as a messianic militant for Black justice is like praising Timothy McVeigh for Nationalist heroics; neither makes much sense unless you are forwarding a hateful agenda, or trying to boost record sales. The disaffected can find heroes in Malcolm X, Emma Goldman, Michael Moore, or a myriad of other citizens who have opposed the cruel machinery of America. Leave Colin Ferguson as a pathetic signpost for hateful lunatics who are mad at all of the wrong people, or, just mad.