Scared to Death

Naked violence in New York

Just before dawn, a pack of Times Square ruffians comes running wildly after a terrified, nearly naked young man. The mob is close behind, screeching, cursing, lobbing bottles and beer cans at the victim ...

In New York City it is not unusual, at any time and in most places, to come upon a movie crew filming an incredible scene. But this demented episode was disturbingly real. At 5 a.m. on June 27 Gerard Coury, 26, straight-arrow son of a middle-class family, was chased by a gang of some 40 youths into a subway station as onlookers jeered him. He leapt past police, who tried to subdue him, and onto the tracks, where he died--perhaps from touching an electrified rail, or maybe from sheer fright.

None of the pursuers was charged with a crime. Shrugs a New York police spokesman: "We have a dead body on the subway tracks. Murder doesn't come into it." Yet just why the youths assaulted the young stranger remains a mystery--or why they laughed as he died. Says a policeman who had tried to rescue Coury: "They all thought it was a big joke."

Coury grew up in Torrington, Conn., a well-scrubbed factory town set in the Berkshire Hills. In high school he was a football player, student council member, class officer, honor roll regular. He dropped in and out of Fairfield (Conn.) University for a couple of years and then held odd jobs close to home. "He was trying to get his act together," says his brother Nimar. Recently a family friend in Washington, D.C., offered him a waiter's job. One morning he boarded a bus for New York City on his way to Washington. Says Nimar: "Before he left he said, 'How great it is to be a human being.' "

Two days later police at Grand Central Terminal found Coury wandering through the rush-hour crowds, without shoes or shirt. He had been mugged, he told them. He used their phone to call home. "Gerry's voice was a bit agitated," recalls Nimar. "He said, 'Mom, they took everything: my shoes, my shirt, my jacket, wallet, everything. Mom, get me out of here.' " The Courys said they would try to contact friends in suburban New Jersey to help him. Coury waited near the police post until midnight. A few hours later he was in Times Square, running from the heckling mob. Another brother, Charles, says Gerry was "accosted, beaten, stripped and abandoned in New York City. I certainly would have freaked out after that."

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