100 Objects #6: "Sharpened Screwdriver"

Bernie Getz’s December 22, 1984 subway shooting of four teenagers from the South Bronx became a turning point in how media, courts, and the public justified vigilante violence. Roman Mars and interviewees frame the incident against 1980s urban decline and a culture shaped by vigilante films like Death Wish; within hours tabloids and mainstream outlets transformed ordinary screwdrivers found in the youths’ pockets into "sharpened screwdrivers" and presented the boys as armed attackers. Historian Heather Ann Thompson and legal analyst Elliot Williams emphasize that the plaintiffs’ tools were catalogued but never used as weapons, and that the sharpened‑screwdriver detail was a manufactured narrative that primed public sympathy for Getz.

Getz fled, surrendered nine days later in Concord, New Hampshire, and gave a two‑hour videotaped confession admitting intent. Defense counsel Barry Slotnick mounted a rhetorically aggressive strategy: racialized descriptors, oversized threatening photographs of the four young men, and a theatrically staged reenactment that depicted them as attackers — tactics that Elliot Williams says skewed the jury’s perception despite their judge‑halted excesses. By June 1987 the jury (10 of 12 white jurors, many with victim experiences) acquitted Getz of attempted murder and assault, convicting only on illegal possession of a .38 Smith & Wesson; Getz served eight months. The episode left lasting consequences: a 1996 civil verdict awarded Darrell Kaby’s family $43 million (never collected due to Getz’s bankruptcy), James Ramsour later died by suicide on an anniversary of the shooting, and the Getz case became a legal and cultural precedent. Roman Mars traces the throughline from Getz to later high‑profile vigilante incidents (Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny), arguing that media mythmaking and a subjective reading of "reasonableness" in self‑defense continue to enable and legitimize extrajudicial violence.