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Goetz rose slowly, partly unzipping his jacket. He asked Canty what he had said. Canty repeated the statement. Goetz says that one of the others made a gesture indicating that he might have a weapon. Goetz later told police that by then he had mentally constructed his "field of fire." Said Goetz: "I had no intention of killing them at that time, but then I saw the smile on his face and the shine in his eyes, that he was enjoying this. I knew what they were going to do. Do you understand?"
Goetz finished unzipping his jacket and pulled out the silver-colored gun. He assumed a combat stance, gripping the revolver with both hands, and shot Canty through the center of his body. He then turned slightly to his right and shot Allen, who had turned to flee, in the back; he fired again, wounding Ramseur in the arm and chest; he then fired a fourth time, a shot that may have missed, at Cabey. Said Victor Flores, 47, a transit authority employee who witnessed the mayhem: "The kids were frightened, backing off, trying to get away. There was no reason to shoot them. They fell one after another. Bang! Bang! Bang!" By his own account, Goetz then walked over to Cabey, who was sprawled on the seat, perhaps playing possum. "You seem to be doing all right," Goetz said. "Here's another." That fifth and last bullet, one of two expanding dumdum slugs in the revolver, may have severed Cabey's spinal cord, paralyzing him from the waist down. In one of the case's many oddities, Flores disputes Goetz's account of what happened with Cabey. "He didn't shoot the kid a second time. He didn't say anything either."
Afterward, in a telephone conversation recorded by a neighbor and later printed in New York magazine, Goetz agitatedly explained how he felt at the time: "If you corner a rat and you are about to butcher it, O.K.? The way I responded was viciously and savagely, just like a rat." Notes Psychologist Morton Bard: "One could argue that Goetz was reliving the earlier incident when he pulled the trigger. The difference is that he acted out dreams of retaliation that most people resolve through fantasy." Goetz's subsequent explanation was more explicit: "I know in my heart I was a murderer . . . I just snapped."
Two women were cowering at the other end of the car. According to Goetz, he asked them if they were all right. When a conductor entered the car, Goetz asserted that the wounded men had tried to rip him off. The train came to a stop before reaching the Chambers Street station. Goetz slipped out, ran along the darkened tracks, and then clambered onto the Chambers Street platform and up the stairs into the street.
He returned home, changed his clothes, packed a bag. He rented a blue American Motors Eagle and headed for Vermont. In a motel in Bennington, he disassembled the .38 and later dumped it, along with his blue windbreaker, into a snowy woods. A week later he called his neighbor Myra Friedman. Goetz sought her help and her ear; he poured out his story in an anxious, confused monologue.