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Where Is Bing? One of Cowan's particular dislikes was Norman Bing, traffic manager at the Neptune World Wide Moving Co. Bing, who is Jewish, had suspended Cowan, a $6.11-an-hour helper, for refusing to move a refrigerator. "What would you think," Cowan said to a companion after one quarrel, "if I went into the office with my guns on, looking for Norman Bing?"
Leaving his home early last week, the hulking Cowan did exactly that. He carefully loaded the trunk of his red '71 Pontiac GTO with a Sako .308 rifle, four pistols and bandoleers of ammunition. Then he drove to the Neptune terminal two blocks away and parked outside the main entrance. "Somebody said that Freddie was outside putting on guns," a Neptune worker recalled later. "We thought it was a joke."
Some joke. Wearing brown pants, a khaki shirt and a black beret with skull and crossbones decorating it, Cowan entered the building and confronted 20 men lounging inside. He shot two black employees, Frederick Holmes, 54, and Joseph Hicks, 59, through the chest at pointblank range—from a distance of only 2 ft. "Where is Bing?" Cowan demanded, as he strode into an adjoining drivers' room. There, James Green, 44, another black, tried to run and was gunned down. An Indian immigrant, Pariyarathu Varghese, 33, came running down a flight of steps and was murdered. Cowan put a pistol to the head of another black driver, Charles Haskett, with whom he worked and for whom he had once even bought lunch. Then he relented and turned away.
Bing had seen Cowan coming in time to duck under a desk. He and most of the 50 other Neptune employees in the building were able to escape when police arrived. The first cop on the scene, Allen McLeod, 33, was picked off by the Sako rifle from a distance of about 30 ft. Three more policemen responding to the shooting calls were wounded.
For the next ten hours the New Rochelle freight terminal was a battleground. Twenty sharpshooters spread out into houses and onto nearby roofs waiting for a shot at Cowan, and police helicopters whirled overhead. By midafternoon, police got inside the building and moved cautiously from office to office, looking for Cowan. They finally found him, dead by his own gun, as darkness descended.
With New York's vast TV, radio and press forces so close, the massacre was not merely covered—it was smothered. As in the Kiritsis incident a week earlier, such publicity stirred critics.
Says University of Southern California Psychiatrist Frederick Hacker: "The media claim to be holding a mirror up to society. But the recent rash of hostage crimes indicates that the media have actually been promoting criminal behavior." Crime reporting has become more pervasive, and viewers appear to like that. As Chicago Psychiatrist Marvin Ziporyn observes sadly: "All you need to do today to see violent crime is to turn on a switch." But he absolves the press—"It merely reflects what is happening on the streets"—and blames instead the growing assertiveness of the individual. "We are moving from a time of restraints back to total liberty."