Five shots fired. Four men down.
Hysteria turned into shock. Piping-hot gun in hand, Goetz stood up and sat down a few times, and paced around for a bit. The police report said that Goetz checked on each of the men after shooting them. Goetz knelt down next to Canty, looked Canty closely in the face, and then shook his head and mumbled about how he needed to get out of there. All four were lying down, and according to Goetz they were “cold, no longer a threat.” They were all in some state of consciousness—breathing but still, their eyes becoming glassy.
As four struggling bodies littered the moving train car, the rest of the passengers began to wonder what they had just witnessed. Mary Gant looked to her right and saw a young black man lying on his stomach with his head toward her, eyes open. They looked at each other in silence. A male voice, which could have been Goetz, or could have been a person who had shoved her in the scrum, called to her. “Miss, are you all right? Did I hurt you? Did I hit you?”
Someone pulled the train’s emergency brake. It screeched to a halt before reaching the Chambers Street station, sparks flying from its wheels. After passengers yelled to Armando Soler, the train’s conductor, that four people had been shot, he got on the public address system and called two urgent codes to the train’s motorman: “12/7,” to request police and ambulance assistance; and the dreaded “12/8,” meaning that someone on the train had a handgun. He then ran into the seventh car and saw a calm Goetz seated there.
As Soler checked on the passengers, including the four young men bleeding out in his subway car, he asked Goetz if he was a police officer. That Goetz had the luxury of being politely asked the question is itself noteworthy; not every subway shooter would have been afforded that grace. Even the very question suggests a veneer of legitimacy for Goetz’s actions. Put another way: Had Troy Canty—or, better yet, the other black men in the car, Garth Reid or Solitaire Macfoy—opened fire in a crowded train car, would they have ever been given the same courtesy?