Fear and Fury Summary, Characters and Themes

Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage by Heather Ann Thompson is a work of narrative history centered on the 1984 New York subway shooting in which Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers: Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, Barry Allen, and James Ramseur. 

Thompson treats the incident not simply as a famous criminal case but as a window into larger changes in American politics, economics, policing, race, media, and public attitudes toward crime. By following the lives of the people involved before and after the shooting, the book challenges the vigilante legend that formed around Goetz and examines why that legend proved so politically powerful.

Summary

Fear and Fury begins with the shooting that will define every life at the center of the book. On December 22, 1984, seventeen-year-old Darrell Cabey rides a New York subway with James Ramseur, Troy Canty, and Barry Allen when Bernhard Goetz suddenly pulls a revolver and shoots all four young men after Troy asks him for five dollars.

Goetz escapes through the subway system and leaves New York while the wounded teenagers are taken to hospitals. Almost immediately, newspapers and broadcasters turn the unidentified shooter into the “Death Wish Vigilante,” and many members of the public celebrate him as an ordinary citizen who finally resisted the crime and disorder they believed had overtaken the city.

The book then reconstructs the very different worlds that produced Darrell and Goetz. Darrell grows up in the South Bronx, where his mother Shirley struggles to provide stability after his father Ronald is killed while trying to prevent the theft of his truck, leaving the family vulnerable to the economic consequences of unemployment, declining public investment, deteriorating housing, weakened schools, and reduced neighborhood services.

Darrell nevertheless has a childhood filled with family relationships, friendships, games, breakdancing, movies, and ordinary neighborhood experiences. As he grows older, however, poor educational opportunities, disappearing jobs, drugs, aggressive policing, and the growing criminalization of young Black men make his future increasingly uncertain.

Goetz grows up in considerably greater material comfort but in a troubled household marked by authoritarian parenting, emotional isolation, bullying, and the scandal surrounding accusations that his father sexually abused teenage boys. As an adult, Goetz becomes increasingly solitary, resentful of authority, suspicious of people around him, and convinced that official institutions cannot be trusted to maintain order.

Living and working in Greenwich Village, Goetz becomes preoccupied with homelessness, drugs, prostitution, garbage, crime, and neighborhood disorder. His complaints increasingly contain explicit racial hostility, and after a confrontation with a teenager leaves him dissatisfied with police and legal responses, he obtains firearms, carries a gun illegally in New York, and begins imagining armed force as the answer to situations in which he feels threatened or ignored.

Thompson places these personal histories within the political changes of the Reagan era. Government programs that had once helped many working- and middle-class families were being reduced while tax cuts, deregulation, weakened labor power, and policies favorable to wealthy business interests were presented as solutions to economic difficulty.

At the same time, media organizations discovered that stories about violent crime could attract frightened audiences. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post became particularly effective at presenting Black suspects as symbols of urban danger while giving much less attention to structural poverty, disinvestment, and the experiences of Black victims.

On the morning of the shooting, Darrell joins Troy, Barry, and James during an ordinary Saturday outing. Some of the young men have used drugs or committed minor offenses, and several have been stealing small amounts of money from arcade machines, but Thompson carefully separates those acts from the claim that they entered the subway planning a violent robbery.

When they encounter Goetz, Troy approaches him and asks for five dollars. Witnesses do not describe the four teenagers surrounding Goetz in a coordinated attack, no one sees them display the screwdrivers later found among their possessions, and Darrell does not approach or threaten Goetz at all.

Goetz nevertheless opens fire, striking the young men in rapid succession. His later statements indicate that once he started shooting he intended to inflict severe injuries, and evidence surrounding Darrell becomes especially disturbing because Goetz described returning toward him after believing that he had not been badly enough injured.

Darrell suffers the most catastrophic consequences. A bullet damages his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed, and later respiratory complications deprive his brain of oxygen, causing severe cognitive impairment that will permanently alter his ability to communicate, remember information, and care for himself.

While Darrell’s family confronts these injuries, the public story moves in the opposite direction. Newspapers emphasize the teenagers’ screwdrivers, previous offenses, and alleged criminality, and their identities as shooting victims are quickly replaced by images of threatening young men who supposedly forced a frightened citizen to defend himself.

Goetz eventually surrenders in New Hampshire and gives police a detailed statement. He admits that he did not actually see a weapon and describes wanting to cause serious harm, but the immense public sympathy already surrounding him makes these statements only one part of a much larger cultural argument about crime, race, government failure, and vigilantism.

The first grand jury hears extensive portions of Goetz’s account but does not hear directly from the wounded teenagers because prosecutors refuse to grant them immunity from unrelated criminal exposure. It dismisses the major shooting charges and indicts Goetz only on weapons offenses, a result celebrated by supporters but regarded by Shirley Cabey and civil-rights advocates as evidence that the victims have never received equal consideration.

A second grand jury is later permitted to hear the case after prosecutors agree to protect some of the victims from unrelated prosecution. Troy and James testify that there was no planned violent robbery, witnesses report seeing no displayed weapons, and the new jury indicts Goetz on attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, and firearms charges.

Years of legal challenges follow before the criminal trial finally begins. Prosecutor Gregory Waples concentrates on Goetz’s recorded statements, physical evidence, medical findings, and the fact that Darrell never threatened him, while defense lawyer Barry Slotnick repeatedly directs attention toward the teenagers’ criminal histories, later offenses, behavior, and the atmosphere of fear surrounding crime in New York.

The trial becomes as much a contest over the identity of the victims as an examination of Goetz’s actions. James Ramseur’s later serious convictions are used to damage his credibility, disputed claims that Darrell admitted to a robbery plan are introduced, and defense experts question the prosecution’s reconstruction of Darrell’s shooting despite medical evidence supporting the conclusion that he was seated when struck.

The jury ultimately acquits Goetz of attempted murder and serious assault while convicting him only of illegal weapons possession. Some jurors appear to focus heavily on what they imagined the teenagers intended to do rather than what the evidence showed they had actually done before the gunfire began, and the verdict reinforces Goetz’s status among supporters as a symbol of legitimate armed self-defense.

Darrell’s family, however, still faces the consequences of permanent paralysis and brain damage. Shirley becomes her son’s principal caregiver while government compensation remains difficult to obtain because officials continue treating Darrell’s association with the other youths as evidence that he may not qualify as an innocent crime victim.

The civil lawsuit against Goetz therefore becomes both a search for financial support and an attempt to establish public responsibility. Civil discovery allows Darrell’s lawyers to question Goetz about his racial attitudes, previous statements, and recollection of the shooting, and Goetz again describes approaching the final victim closely and pulling the trigger.

Goetz responds by claiming that Darrell’s disabilities have been exaggerated and employs investigators and medical consultants to challenge his condition. Instead, psychological examinations and even secretly recorded interactions demonstrate severe cognitive impairment, suggestibility, confusion, and dependence, confirming the devastating effects of the injuries rather than disproving them.

In 1996, the civil case finally reaches a Bronx jury. Unlike the criminal trial, this proceeding forces Goetz to testify directly, while medical experts explain Darrell’s injuries and Shirley describes the long burden of caring for a son who can no longer live independently.

The jury finds Goetz civilly liable and awards Darrell $43 million, including punitive damages. Goetz later declares bankruptcy and keeps few recoverable assets, so the Cabey family receives little financial benefit, but the judgment gives them something the criminal verdict denied: formal recognition that Darrell was wrongfully injured.

Fear and Fury then follows the political ideas surrounding the shooting into later decades. Tough-on-crime policies expand under Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton, conservative media grows through Fox News and other outlets, racial and economic resentment remains politically profitable, and Donald Trump turns many of these grievances into a central part of his political appeal.

Thompson connects the Goetz case to later disputes over private and state violence, including the killings of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and the shooting in Kenosha involving Kyle Rittenhouse. Her comparison becomes especially direct with the 2023 death of Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man killed after Daniel Penny placed him in a chokehold on a New York subway, after which Penny was celebrated by many of the same political forces that had once treated Goetz as a hero.

The final section returns to the four young men whose lives were largely lost beneath decades of political symbolism. Troy eventually enters rehabilitation and rebuilds part of his life, Barry spends years struggling with addiction and incarceration before dying, James serves twenty-five years in prison and later dies from an apparent deliberate overdose, while Darrell remains profoundly disabled and dependent on others for almost every aspect of daily living.

Shirley continues protecting Darrell until her death in 2015, after which his siblings remain involved in his care. The book closes by arguing that the subway shooting was never merely an isolated encounter between five people: it became an example of how economic abandonment, racial assumptions, sensational media, political strategy, and fear can determine whose pain is recognized, whose violence is excused, and whose version of events becomes part of national memory.

Characters

Darrell Cabey

Darrell Cabey is the human center of Fear and Fury, even though public discussion of the shooting repeatedly pushes him to the margins. He begins as a shy South Bronx teenager who enjoys breakdancing, friends, movies, and ordinary neighborhood life while growing up in a household marked by his father’s death and his mother’s determination to keep the family stable.

His importance lies partly in how little he actually does during the confrontation with Goetz. Darrell does not ask for money, approach Goetz, display a weapon, or make a threatening gesture, yet he receives the most devastating injuries and becomes permanently paralyzed and cognitively impaired.

Darrell also represents the consequences of allowing assumptions about a group to replace judgment about an individual. Because he is traveling with Troy, Barry, and James, later discussions repeatedly treat him as though responsibility can be transferred through association, even when the evidence regarding his own actions is unusually clear.

His later life demonstrates the profound imbalance between the person who uses violence and the person forced to live with its consequences. Goetz can move through later decades as a public figure, while Darrell requires assistance with nearly every aspect of daily existence and remains physically connected to the shooting for the rest of his life.

Bernhard “Bernie” Goetz

Fear and Fury presents Bernhard Goetz as far more complicated than either the heroic vigilante celebrated by his supporters or a simple embodiment of evil. His childhood combines financial comfort with authoritarian family relationships, social isolation, bullying, and the public disgrace produced by his father’s sexual-abuse trial.

As an adult, these experiences contribute to a personality marked by independence, resentment, suspicion of authority, and great confidence in his personal judgment. He repeatedly clashes with employers, officials, neighbors, and institutions whenever their responses fail to match what he considers reasonable.

His attitudes toward urban disorder gradually become inseparable from racial hostility. He uses racist language at a neighborhood meeting, becomes increasingly angry about homelessness and crime, illegally obtains and carries firearms, and develops the belief that he personally must enforce the standards that official institutions have failed to maintain.

The most revealing aspect of Goetz is the contradiction between his claim of fear and his expressions of deliberate punishment. His own statements describe an intention to inflict maximum damage, while his later efforts to challenge Darrell’s disabilities reveal his difficulty accepting responsibility for the permanent consequences of his actions.

Shirley Cabey

Shirley Cabey is one of the strongest moral presences in Fear and Fury because her role is defined by persistence rather than public spectacle. Widowed after Ronald Cabey’s death, she raises five sons while holding a state food-service job and tries to maintain stability under difficult economic circumstances.

After Darrell is shot, Shirley’s entire life changes. She waits through surgeries, receives the devastating information about his paralysis and later brain damage, and eventually becomes the person responsible for protecting and caring for a son who can no longer live independently.

Her conflict is not merely with Goetz but with a broader set of institutions that repeatedly question Darrell’s innocence or eligibility for support. The refusal of crime-victim compensation forces Shirley to continue defending the basic proposition that her son should not be considered responsible for being shot merely because of the people beside him.

Shirley’s commitment lasts for decades, through criminal disappointment, civil litigation, financial difficulty, hostile publicity, and invasive questioning. She dies in 2015 only after helping ensure that Darrell has entered a care facility, making protection of her son one of the defining commitments of her life.

Troy Canty

Troy Canty is the young man whose request for five dollars becomes the immediate trigger for the subway confrontation. The book does not present him as innocent of every form of misconduct, but it sharply separates his petty offenses and drug use from the claim that he attempted a violent robbery.

Troy acknowledges asking Goetz for money but consistently denies that the request was accompanied by a threat. His position is simple: if Goetz had refused, the encounter would have ended, a version broadly consistent with the absence of testimony that Troy displayed a weapon.

His character demonstrates how prior wrongdoing can make the public reluctant to recognize someone as a victim. Even after surviving the shooting, Troy faces suspicion, threats, and denial of assistance from institutions that seem to treat imperfect behavior as evidence that his injuries were deserved.

Later in life, he struggles with cocaine addiction but eventually enters rehabilitation, works at a car wash, develops mechanical skills, marries, and withdraws from public discussion. His refusal to keep participating in the media narrative suggests a man who concludes that public institutions will never allow him to define himself on his own terms.

Barry Allen

Barry Allen is another figure whose identity becomes almost completely controlled by the story constructed around the shooting. Before the attack, he has participated in petty criminal activity and drug use, but witnesses do not establish that he threatened Goetz with deadly force.

During the shooting, Barry initially misunderstands Goetz’s movements and then realizes that the man is firing at them. He is struck in the back while attempting to get away, a detail that complicates the claim that every shot was necessary to stop an immediate attack.

Barry’s later life is marked by addiction, poverty, and imprisonment. Rather than receiving a clean opportunity to rebuild after surviving a nationally famous shooting, he remains caught within many of the social conditions that had already limited his opportunities before 1984.

His death after years of instability reinforces one of the book’s central human arguments. The public remembers Barry primarily as one of the four youths Goetz shot, while the person behind that label largely disappears from the national story.

James Ramseur

James Ramseur becomes one of the most difficult figures for the prosecution because his later criminal record gives Goetz’s defense enormous opportunities to attack his credibility. He is eventually convicted of rape, robbery, and sodomy in an unrelated case and receives a lengthy prison sentence.

Yet those later crimes do not establish what James did inside the subway car before Goetz shot him. He testifies that he was not close to Goetz and did not threaten him, creating a legal distinction between his moral responsibility for other acts and his right not to be shot without justification.

During the criminal trial, Barry Slotnick’s aggressive questioning transforms James from a witness into a symbolic defendant. His anger, refusal to cooperate, and eventual removal from court damage the prosecution because jurors are invited to judge the kind of person he has become rather than the exact circumstances surrounding the shooting.

After twenty-five years in prison, James returns home with little stability and eventually dies from an apparent deliberate prescription-drug overdose on the anniversary of the shooting. His life becomes an example of how trauma, punishment, poverty, and later wrongdoing can coexist without making the original violence against him lawful.

Ronald Cabey

Ronald Cabey appears only through Darrell’s family history, but his death is crucial to understanding the economic and emotional world in which Darrell grows up. Ronald supports the family as a truck driver until he is killed in 1973 while trying to stop someone from stealing his truck.

His death deprives Darrell of a father at seven years old and leaves Shirley responsible for raising five boys. The family’s movement into public housing and increasing financial insecurity demonstrate how a single violent event can transform an entire household long before the better-known subway shooting occurs.

Ronald therefore functions as an important reminder that the Cabey family’s history does not begin with Goetz. Their vulnerability develops through earlier personal loss combined with structural economic pressures that make recovery difficult.

Myra Friedman

Myra Friedman, Goetz’s downstairs neighbor, occupies an unusual position because she knows him personally while also becoming an important source of evidence against him. When Goetz leaves New York, she speaks with him and records portions of their conversations because she suspects he is the unidentified subway shooter.

Her recordings preserve Goetz’s discussions about weapons, New York, the shooting, and the surprising public admiration being directed toward the fugitive. She also tries to persuade him to surrender, indicating that her response to him is not purely adversarial.

Friedman later notices changes in Goetz as public support grows and becomes concerned about his continuing fascination with firearms. Her character helps show how admiration from strangers affects Goetz’s self-perception and encourages him to see his actions as part of a larger public cause.

Robert Morgenthau

District Attorney Robert Morgenthau represents the institutional effort to prosecute the shooting while navigating an intensely hostile political environment. He initially approaches the case cautiously, partly because he understands that excessively dramatic treatment of Goetz could strengthen the public image of him as a persecuted citizen.

The first grand jury’s refusal to indict Goetz on the shooting charges becomes a serious setback. Morgenthau nevertheless refuses to regard that decision as the final word once it becomes clear that the young men themselves were never permitted to explain the encounter.

His decision to pursue a second presentation demonstrates his willingness to reopen a politically explosive case despite accusations that prosecutors are targeting a public hero. Morgenthau’s role shows the difficulty legal institutions face when a criminal case has already been decided emotionally in newspapers, television, and public opinion.

Susan Braver

Assistant District Attorney Susan Braver participates in the early prosecution and travels to New Hampshire as authorities prepare to bring Goetz back to New York. Her position gives her direct access to Goetz’s extraordinary statements about the shooting and the state of mind he claims to have experienced.

Her most difficult problem emerges during the first grand-jury proceeding. Because prosecutors refuse to immunize the wounded teenagers from unrelated criminal exposure, Braver must present the shooting without testimony from the very people who were shot.

The result illustrates how procedural choices can shape the emotional balance of a legal proceeding. Goetz’s voice becomes dominant while the victims remain absent, helping produce an outcome in which the major shooting charges initially disappear.

Gregory Waples

Gregory Waples becomes the principal courtroom representative of the prosecution during the criminal trial. His style is restrained and methodical, sharply contrasting with Barry Slotnick’s theatrical approach.

Waples consistently attempts to narrow the case to observable conduct. Rather than allowing general fear of crime to determine the meaning of the shooting, he asks what each young man actually did and whether those actions justified deadly force.

His strongest argument concerns Darrell. Waples repeatedly reminds jurors that Darrell never approached Goetz, spoke to him, displayed a weapon, or made a threatening movement, and he uses medical and physical evidence to direct attention back toward the injured teenager rather than the mythology surrounding the defendant.

Although the jury ultimately acquits Goetz of the major charges, Waples serves an important analytical role in the book because his approach represents evidence-based judgment against emotionally powerful assumptions.

Barry Slotnick

Barry Slotnick is one of the most influential figures in shaping Goetz’s criminal defense. He understands that the case is already surrounded by public fear of crime and therefore constructs a courtroom narrative in which the individual teenagers become representatives of the threatening city that many jurors believe they have personally experienced.

His strategy repeatedly moves beyond the immediate encounter. The prior misconduct and later crimes of the young men are introduced whenever possible, allowing jurors to consider whether they dislike or distrust the victims rather than focusing exclusively on whether Goetz’s individual shots were legally justified.

Slotnick’s treatment of James Ramseur is the clearest example. By emphasizing James’s later convictions and provoking an angry confrontation, he makes it emotionally difficult for jurors to separate the person James later becomes from the question of whether he threatened Goetz in 1984.

His success shows how courtroom storytelling can influence legal judgment. Slotnick does not need jurors to approve every detail of Goetz’s conduct if he can persuade them that the people he shot belonged to a category they already fear.

William Kunstler

William Kunstler becomes an important advocate for Darrell after the criminal process initially fails to produce serious charges against Goetz. Together with Ron Kuby, he pursues a civil claim seeking damages sufficient to support Darrell’s lifelong medical needs.

Kunstler’s involvement changes the direction of the family’s struggle. Instead of relying only on prosecutors or public sympathy, Shirley and Darrell gain an independent legal route through which Goetz’s responsibility can be tested.

His death in 1995 prevents him from seeing the civil verdict, but the case he helped sustain eventually produces the formal recognition the Cabey family had sought for more than a decade.

Ron Kuby

Ron Kuby eventually becomes the central courtroom advocate for Darrell in Fear and Fury. After William Kunstler’s death, Kuby carries much of the civil case while working with limited resources against a defendant who repeatedly delays proceedings and challenges Darrell’s injuries.

Kuby’s most effective strategy is radical simplicity. During the Bronx trial, he asks jurors to focus on what Darrell did to Goetz and what Goetz did to Darrell, removing much of the social mythology that had dominated the criminal prosecution.

His questioning forces Goetz to confront his own prior statements, racial remarks, and the physical reality of Darrell’s condition. The resulting $43 million verdict shows the effectiveness of centering the injured person rather than allowing broader anxieties about crime to replace the specific facts of the encounter.

Judge Stephen Crane

Judge Stephen Crane presides over major stages of the criminal litigation and becomes an important figure in determining how the legal process unfolds. He initially authorizes the second grand-jury presentation, allowing prosecutors to present evidence from the wounded teenagers that had been absent from the first proceeding.

Later, however, Crane dismisses several serious indictments because of concerns about the grand-jury process and self-defense instructions. New York’s highest court eventually reverses that decision and restores the charges.

During the trial he manages highly contentious testimony, including James Ramseur’s confrontation with Slotnick, and even brings jurors onto a subway car so they can understand the physical setting. His role illustrates how judicial decisions about evidence, procedure, instructions, and courtroom control can become decisive in a politically charged case.

Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin is significant because he publicly challenges the heroic story forming around Goetz when many popular outlets are moving in the opposite direction. He argues that frustration with crime does not give private citizens unrestricted authority to shoot people.

Breslin also draws attention to the public costs created by Darrell’s permanent injuries, forcing discussion back toward consequences rather than abstract arguments about vigilantism. His criticism gives voice to those who believe New Yorkers’ legitimate fear of crime cannot excuse indiscriminate violence.

At the same time, his reporting becomes involved in controversy when he publishes a claim that Darrell supposedly said the group intended to rob Goetz. Because Darrell’s cognitive condition makes such statements highly uncertain, the episode shows the enormous power journalists possess to influence both courtroom strategy and public understanding.

Mark Lesly

Mark Lesly is a juror whose later public account offers Thompson insight into how the criminal jury reached its verdict. Soon after the acquittal, he cooperates with the New York Post in producing an insider version of the deliberations that reinforces the image of Goetz as a justified defender.

His account suggests that jurors increasingly evaluated the four young men themselves rather than limiting discussion to Goetz’s legal responsibility. Questions about the teenagers’ records, behavior, and presumed intentions become connected to the judgment of whether the shooting was justified.

Lesly therefore functions as a window into the larger cultural assumptions carried into the jury room. His role supports Thompson’s argument that legal judgment cannot always be cleanly separated from the stories a society has already accepted about race, danger, and innocence.

Curtis Sliwa

Curtis Sliwa appears as the leader of the Guardian Angels, a group that presents itself as a response to public fear and perceived failures of conventional policing. His organization collects money for Goetz on subway trains, publicly identifying the shooter with ordinary citizens who believe they have been abandoned by government.

Sliwa’s importance lies less in his personal relationship with Goetz than in his role as a political symbol. The fundraising effort turns support for an individual defendant into a broader statement about crime, self-defense, and dissatisfaction with public institutions.

Through figures such as Sliwa, Goetz’s legal case becomes a movement. The shooting is no longer treated only as an event requiring factual investigation but as an opportunity for people to express frustration with New York itself.

C. Vernon Mason

Civil-rights lawyer C. Vernon Mason represents the argument that racial inequality must remain central to understanding the response to the shooting. He rejects efforts to transform Goetz into a neutral symbol of self-defense while ignoring the racial assumptions surrounding the four wounded teenagers.

Mason insists that the legality of the shooting should depend on evidence concerning the actual encounter rather than generalized fear of Black youth. His stance challenges the emotional framework that makes the victims appear dangerous before their actions have even been established.

His role is therefore both legal and political. He helps articulate why many Black New Yorkers experience the celebration of Goetz not merely as support for self-defense but as evidence of unequal standards governing whose fear is considered reasonable and whose life is considered threatening.

Roy Innis

Roy Innis complicates any simple racial division over the Goetz case. As a conservative Black activist, he publicly supports Goetz and describes him as an avenger, giving the shooter’s white supporters an argument that admiration for him cannot automatically be interpreted as racial hostility.

Thompson uses Innis’s position to demonstrate that political arguments about race do not produce perfectly uniform opinions within racial groups. His support also reveals how ideas about crime, personal responsibility, and armed self-defense can cross conventional political categories.

At the same time, his endorsement becomes useful to people who want to dismiss broader concerns about racial stereotyping. His presence therefore shows how a single dissenting voice can be used strategically within a much larger public dispute.

Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch is one of the book’s most important media figures because his ownership of the New York Post helps create the political environment in which the Goetz shooting is interpreted. The paper becomes increasingly conservative and commercially dependent on sensational stories about crime, danger, and urban disorder.

Murdoch’s media strategy repeatedly emphasizes Black criminal suspects while giving less attention to Black victims or structural explanations for social problems. This style encourages readers to interpret poverty, crime, and disorder primarily as moral failures of individuals.

His later creation of Fox News expands the same approach from a New York tabloid into national television. Murdoch therefore represents the transformation of fear and resentment into both a profitable media product and a durable political force.

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan functions as a major political figure in the historical argument surrounding the shooting. His administration represents the shift away from many New Deal and Great Society assumptions toward tax cuts, reduced regulation, weaker social spending, aggressive criminal enforcement, and greater emphasis on individual responsibility.

Thompson connects these policies to the contrasting conditions experienced by Darrell and Goetz. Neighborhoods such as the South Bronx lose resources and opportunities while public discussion increasingly treats their resulting problems as proof of personal failure rather than consequences of political choices.

Reagan’s importance is therefore larger than any direct connection to the subway shooting. His era helps establish the economic, political, and rhetorical framework through which Americans begin interpreting crime, race, government, and inequality for decades afterward.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump first appears as an example of the economic order benefiting wealthy developers during the Reagan-era transformation of New York. His inherited advantages, favorable development arrangements, public image, and highly visible lifestyle embody a culture increasingly willing to treat wealth as evidence of individual merit.

His later political career becomes part of Thompson’s argument about the durability of grievance-based politics. Trump combines promises of tax cuts and deregulation with claims that immigrants, minorities, political opponents, and liberal institutions threaten ordinary Americans.

The book presents his rise not as an unexpected break from earlier politics but as the development of tendencies already visible during the Goetz era. Racial resentment, admiration of forceful individuals, distrust of government, media sensationalism, and policies favoring wealth all find a powerful political vehicle in his campaigns and presidency.

Rudy Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani represents the movement of many ideas associated with the Goetz era from private vigilantism into official government policy. As mayor, he promotes Broken Windows policing, aggressive enforcement of minor offenses, CompStat, and a highly visible law-and-order agenda.

Crime declines dramatically during this period, but Thompson stresses that multiple social and economic factors contribute to the change. Meanwhile, aggressive enforcement falls disproportionately on poor Black and Latino communities.

Giuliani’s political success makes toughness toward disorder an admired governing principle. The frustration that once encouraged citizens to celebrate Goetz now becomes connected to official policing practices and a broader transformation of public space.

Daniel Penny

Daniel Penny appears near the end of the story as part of Thompson’s direct comparison between the political cultures of 1984 and the twenty-first century. In 2023 he restrains Jordan Neely in a chokehold on a New York subway while Neely is experiencing a mental-health crisis, and Neely dies.

Penny is later prosecuted and acquitted of criminally negligent homicide. As with Goetz, public discussion quickly divides between people who view the incident as an unnecessary killing and people who believe a private citizen acted because official institutions failed to protect passengers.

His character is important because the reaction to him demonstrates how durable the vigilante framework has become. Once again, the person who uses lethal force can become a public hero while intense scrutiny falls on the history and personal difficulties of the person who died.

Jordan Neely

Jordan Neely is presented as a vulnerable Black man whose death allows Thompson to show the continuing relevance of the earlier subway shooting. He is unhoused, experiencing serious mental-health difficulties, and behaving erratically enough to frighten passengers when Penny restrains him.

Public debate soon focuses heavily on Neely’s troubled history, just as coverage after the Goetz shooting concentrated on the conduct and records of the four teenagers. His vulnerability becomes secondary to the question of whether others considered him threatening.

Neely therefore becomes part of the book’s larger argument about who receives the presumption of innocence. His death shows how easily fear can transform someone needing help into a symbolic danger against whom extreme force is treated as understandable.

Themes

The Construction of Victims and Villains

The distinction between victim and aggressor is repeatedly shown to depend on storytelling as much as evidence. Fear and Fury begins with four Black teenagers lying wounded in a subway car, yet public discussion quickly asks whether the shooter was actually the victim because the young men belonged to a group already associated in the popular imagination with crime.

This reversal is essential to understanding the book. Darrell does not approach Goetz, speak to him, display a weapon, or participate in Troy’s request for money, but association becomes powerful enough to make his individual behavior almost irrelevant.

The criminal trial extends this pattern by repeatedly examining the teenagers’ histories and later offenses. James Ramseur’s later convictions become particularly damaging because jurors can emotionally transform information about what he did afterward into imagined evidence about what he intended before the shooting.

The civil trial changes the narrative by focusing much more directly on Darrell. When Ron Kuby reduces the conflict to what Darrell did to Goetz and what Goetz did to Darrell, the story becomes much harder to distort.

The theme returns through Jordan Neely decades later. Once again, public attention moves quickly toward the history of the person subjected to lethal force, showing how easily social assumptions can determine who is seen as dangerous and who is allowed to claim fear.

Race, Fear, and the Meaning of Reasonableness

Fear is never treated as a purely private emotion because social beliefs determine which people appear threatening in the first place. Goetz’s fear develops alongside explicit racial resentment, years of frustration with New York, repeated confrontations, and a growing conviction that certain groups represent urban disorder.

The criminal case therefore raises a difficult question about reasonable self-defense. A person may genuinely feel frightened, but the law must still determine whether that fear reasonably corresponds to what another person is actually doing.

The response to Darrell demonstrates the problem clearly. Nothing in his conduct establishes a deadly threat, yet jurors and members of the public can still imagine him as dangerous because he is a young Black man traveling with other young Black men.

Thompson also connects this pattern to broader incidents of racial violence, policing, Stand Your Ground laws, and later public debates. The recurring problem is that apparently neutral language about threat can carry assumptions formed through decades of racial stereotypes.

The comparison between Goetz and Penny strengthens the point. Both controversies invite people to decide whether a white man’s fear of a Black stranger should itself be treated as evidence that extreme force was justified.

The book ultimately questions any concept of reasonableness that ignores the social forces shaping perception. If one group is repeatedly imagined as inherently dangerous, then personal fear can reproduce discrimination even when the law never explicitly mentions race.

Media, Political Power, and Manufactured Grievance

Public anger becomes politically valuable when media organizations can identify a recognizable enemy and repeatedly connect that enemy to people’s frustrations. Fear and Fury traces this process from the New York Post’s treatment of crime to the national influence of Fox News, talk radio, digital outlets, and political figures who rely on similar emotional strategies.

The Goetz case provides an ideal example because the unidentified shooter becomes a hero before investigators have established the facts. The “vigilante” label allows people who feel frightened, economically insecure, or angry about government to project those concerns onto one dramatic act of violence.

Media framing then influences the legal process itself. Potential jurors arrive with years of exposure to stories about crime and urban collapse, while defense lawyers can rely on those assumptions without having to create them inside the courtroom.

The political consequences extend much further. Economic policies favoring wealthy interests become easier to sustain when resentment is directed toward racial minorities, welfare recipients, immigrants, protesters, and other groups portrayed as responsible for social decline.

Trump’s political rise represents an advanced version of this strategy. Economic promises benefiting wealthy interests coexist with appeals centered on immigration, racial conflict, crime, and cultural resentment.

The theme therefore concerns more than biased reporting. It examines an entire political economy in which fear produces audiences, audiences produce profit, and profitable grievance becomes a resource for political power.

Public Disinvestment, Punishment, and Inequality

The conditions surrounding the subway shooting cannot be separated from the economic history of New York. Darrell grows up in a South Bronx shaped by highway construction, discriminatory housing policies, job losses, failing public services, landlord neglect, reduced recreation, and declining educational opportunities.

Thompson contrasts this decline with an earlier period when government programs had actively helped many white working-class families obtain housing, education, employment security, and economic mobility. When Black and Latino families seek similar opportunities, political support for many forms of public assistance weakens.

The state does not simply disappear from neglected communities. Investment in housing, employment, education, and treatment may decline while spending on policing, prosecution, and imprisonment expands.

That contradiction becomes increasingly visible from the Reagan administration through the War on Drugs and later crime policies. Communities denied resources for stability receive increasingly aggressive systems of surveillance and punishment instead.

Darrell’s own life captures the human consequences. His family struggles to obtain compensation after he is permanently disabled, while enormous public resources are available for legal proceedings, policing, imprisonment, and the institutions responsible for deciding whether he deserves recognition as a victim.

The theme ultimately connects economic and racial inequality. A society that repeatedly withdraws opportunities and then punishes people for the conditions produced by that withdrawal can turn structural failure into individual blame, making inequality appear natural rather than politically created.