Vigilante

All week long the calls flooded in: hundreds to a special police hot line, hundreds more to newspapers and TV stations. But there were few helpful clues to the identity of the man who had coolly, deliberately shot and wounded four teenagers aboard a Manhattan subway train three days before Christmas. Nor did most of the callers seem to want him caught. Indeed, many praised the so- called subway vigilante. Several suggested that he run for mayor, and others volunteered to help pay for his defense if he is caught and tried. One World War II veteran offered to give the gunman his Bronze Star. "The story," wrote shocked New York Daily News Columnist Jimmy Breslin, "is more popular than a carol."

The story, as told by witnesses, went this way: the four youths, all neighbors from The Bronx, clustered menacingly around a blond man wearing metal-framed glasses who had taken a seat in the car. They asked him for the time, then a match, then a cigarette; finally one asked if he had $5. "Yes, I have $5 for each of you," he replied. He stood up, whipped a silver revolver out of the waistband of his jeans and fired a well-aimed bullet into each of his harassers as other passengers dived screaming to the floor. The gunman then helped two terrified women to their feet and calmly told a conductor that the youths "tried to rip me off." He stepped through the rear door of the car, jumped onto the tracks and disappeared into the gloom of the subway tunnel. His victims, all ages 18 or 19, were rushed to hospitals; three appeared to be recovering, but Darryl Cabey was paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet that severed his spinal cord. All four turned out to have arrest records, and three were found to have been carrying sharpened screwdrivers.

Many New Yorkers saw the shooting victims as symbols of the subway crime that has terrorized innumerable city residents and the gunman as a real-life counterpart of the vigilante hero portrayed by Charles Bronson in the 1974 movie Death Wish. But it was the vigilante who had committed one of the most violent subway crimes in years. Police distributed thousands of flyers bearing a sketch of the gunman, whose likely age they put at 25 to 30, and at week's end claimed to have received some leads from citizens who did not think him worthy of praise. Said New York Mayor Ed Koch: "This city will not tolerate vigilantism. That's the difference between the wild West and a civilized society."