100 Objects #6: "Sharpened Screwdriver"

How was a household tool reimagined as a deadly weapon…that never actually existed?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:31Roman Mars?

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• 1:11Roman Mars?

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• 1:44Roman Mars?

  It's 1984. Ronald Reagan is president. MTV is just three years old. And it's the era of the Death Wish movies.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  This is the story of a man who decided to clean up the most violent town in the world.

• 2:05Roman Mars?

  If you've never seen the Death Wish movies, they follow the actor Charles Bronson as he goes on a shooting spree to, depending on the movie, avenge the murder of his wife or the murders of other ordinary New Yorkers who fall prey to the city's wildest, most violent criminals.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  The plot sort of doesn't matter in a weird way.

• 2:26Roman Mars?

  This is historian Heather Ann Thompson, author of the new book Fear and Fury.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  What matters is that the audience is relating to this feeling of always unsettled when you leave your apartment or your home and that at any given moment, some young black or brown thug will cause you harm.

• 2:50Roman Mars?

  The 80s were full of movies like this. Death Wish, The Exterminator, the Dirty Harry movies.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  This is kind of a glorified vigilante genre of media. Every man for himself, make sure you're armed. Take out any would be assailant on your own. Make sure that you're protecting your family.

• 3:11Roman Mars?

  And that every man for himself message resonated with people. All the movies came out in what was actually a very difficult moment in cities like New York.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  This is four years into the Reagan revolution. Cities have been stripped of a lot of their social resources and trash is piling up on the city's streets. Muggings are up, the drug trade is up. The city is feeling dangerous. There's mainly a sense that nobody is doing anything about any of this. There's a real lack of understanding of why are cities feeling so under siege.

• 3:53Roman Mars?

  Then in 1984, something tragic happens in New York City. A white man named Bernie Getz, fed up with the crime and violence of the city, boards the subway and shoots four black teenagers. None of them have weapons. But as the story spreads and becomes a headline in papers across the city, it starts transforming into a fantasy pulled right out of Death Wish, complete with dangerous armed criminals.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  You know, they're not always necessarily going to have the gun, right? But they're going to have something. They're going to slash you with jagged glass, or they're going to whip out a tire iron. And in the Bernie Getz case, there's sort of a new version of this, which is that young teenagers in the city are carrying screwdrivers.

• 4:49Roman Mars?

  Not just screwdrivers, sharpened screwdrivers, as in, the normal tool transformed into a piercing deadly weapon. Only, it was completely made up. The teens were not carrying sharpened screwdrivers, or any other kind of weapon. That was the invention of this one moment in 1984. A sneaky new weapon, and a powerful symbol. From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, how the mythical sharpened screwdriver at the heart of the Bernie Getz shooting

• 5:32Roman Mars?

  surfaced a new era of misinformation, and why it's still invoked as a justification for white vigilante violence today.

• 5:54Roman Mars?

  Before the four teenagers in the Getz case became known as sharpened screwdriver-wielding criminals, they were just four kids in the South Bronx.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  If New York was in bad shape, the South Bronx was in catastrophic shape.

• 6:08Roman Mars?

  This is Elliot Williams, legal analyst and author of a book on Getz called Five Bullets.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  The mid-1980s were a quite significant period of transition. Certainly, just about everything withdrew as the city tightened its belt.

• 6:22Roman Mars?

  Firemen, police, sanitation workers, gone. Public schools were decimated. And stuck in the middle of that were four young men: Barry Allen, Daryl Kaybee, Troy Candy, and James Ramsour.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  They were all between 18 and 19 years old, and lived in a subsidized housing project called Claremont Village in the Bronx.

• 6:43Roman Mars?

  Like Bernie, the four teenagers were soon to become famous. But we still actually don't know much about their lives.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  I tried to speak to all of the surviving young men. Two of the four are surviving. I tried very hard to speak to them. I got as close as speaking to two of Darryl Kaby's sisters for the book, but they did not want to be on the record or quoted in the book, and I respected that.

• 7:05Roman Mars?

  Still, there are some small details we do know. We know they had siblings. We know James Remsour was a talented breakdancer.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  We know that Barry Allen was a young father. We know Darryl Kaby ultimately is raised, for most of his childhood, by only his mother because his father, who'd been working as a taxi driver, had been crushed by his own cab in a carjacking. And his mother very much wanted more for him, wanted him to get away from all of the pressures and troubles of the South Bronx to sort of find a better life.

• 7:41Roman Mars?

  But at this point in 1984, none of them had been able to get away.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  So these are four kids who are hanging around essentially day after day and have no money, no jobs, no prospects, but who still, of course, want to go on a date, want to play a video game, want to be a teenager. And so they decide on December 22nd, 1984, that they're going to go into the city and they're going to go to a video arcade because video arcades had machines that you could take a screwdriver, jimmy open the receptacle, and you could get some quarters out of it. And in 1984, if you got a bunch of quarters,

• 8:30Speaker 02

  that was the difference between you being able to get something to eat, between you being able to imagine maybe taking your girlfriend to the movies. That was the difference between having a life and not having a life.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  But I will note, it was not that they were the sort of street gang who were out marauding or wilding or whatever else. This was a common act that teenagers did.

• 9:00Roman Mars?

  I mean, this was the golden age of arcade games. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, these games were everywhere.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  You're talking liquor stores, bodegas, bowling alleys. It was painfully easy for someone with a long screwdriver and a little ingenuity to just pop it open and run away with all of that money in it. And in many respects, was cleaner or safer than mugging or robbing someone. It wasn't that police were likely to move heaven and earth to try to track down a kid with $80 of quarters in his pocket. And even if you got caught, you wouldn't go to jail for a long time.

• 9:35Roman Mars?

  So three days before Christmas 1984, when the city is bustling and people are scrambling to get last minute gifts, the four teenagers get on a train to go to an arcade downtown.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  They got on, they jumped the turnstile in the South Bronx. They were goofing off. They were certainly doing pull-ups on the bars, walking around, asking people for cigarettes or for matches or whatever else.

• 10:01Roman Mars?

  Meanwhile, Bertie Getz in Manhattan, about 30 minutes south of the Bronx on the train, is about to leave his apartment.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  He's had a frustrating morning and he decides that he's gonna get on a train and he's gonna go down and potentially see some friends, maybe have a drink or two. But whatever, get out of the apartment. And so he leaves mid-afternoon to walk very nearby to the 14th Street Station. He gets on the two train going downtown and onto this one car, there are these four teenagers.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  They were having a really good time. They are joking around. They're laughing. Back in the day, subways had these straps that hung down and they were, you know, swinging on those straps and goofing around and talking to people. Hey, what's up? You got a light? And so Bernie Getz sits down and, and decides to sit right across from them, which, you know, is noteworthy to the teens because of course, you know, nobody wants to sit next to teenagers.

• 11:08Roman Mars?

  The train wasn't full, so Bernie Getz didn't have to sit next to the teenagers, but he did.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  And one of them, who is really closest to him named Troy Canty, is sort of interested in this. And he says, hey, you know, he greets him and Bernie Getz kind of gruffly, you know, so, you know, hey, responds back. And he's kind of encouraged and he's encouraged in particular to ask this guy, does he have $5? So that was not a particularly weird thing for Troy Canty to say, hey, have you got five bucks? This is the 80s and panhandling is the name of the game. You can't go anywhere in New York City in 1984 without somebody saying, hey, you got a dollar, you got five bucks.

• 11:53Roman Mars?

  But Bernie doesn't like that.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Bernie Getz stands up. He slowly turns and in that moment Troy Canty sort of thinks, wow, this guy's actually going to give me five bucks. Cool. But what happens is Bernie Getz stands up, reaches into the waistband of his slacks, and what he has there is a hidden holster.

• 12:16Roman Mars?

  What Troy didn't know was that Bernie Getz routinely carried guns.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  And in New York, that was illegal to just carry a gun because you want to do. So he'd actually purchased his guns illegally because he'd gone down to Florida and purchased them and brought them back.

• 12:32Roman Mars?

  So Bernie has one of those illegal guns on him, a .38 Smith & Wesson. And now he pulls it out on the train.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  He swings around, assumes a combat position and shoots Troy Canty front on, straight in the chest. And immediately right behind Troy is his friend Barry Allen, who's not said a word to Bernie Gatz. He horrified, tries to get away, tries to run, and Bernie Gatz shoots him in the back. And then their friend James Ramzour, who's even further down the train, who's also said nothing to Bernie Gatz, he shoots him as he's trying to get away in the arm, it goes through his side and ultimately into his lungs.

• 13:15Roman Mars?

  Now, three of the four teens are on the floor of the train, bleeding. Troy Canty, from a bullet to the chest. Barry Allen, from a bullet to the back. James Ramzour, from a bullet to his arm and side. Bernie also fires at the fourth teen, Daryl KB, and misses. Shaking, KB sits down in the rear of the car, head down, and grips the edge of a seat, hoping that Bernie will just move on.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  And when Bernie Gatz walks over to this fourth teenager, Daryl KB, he looks down at him and he says, "You look okay. Here's another." And that's when he puts a gun straight in his side, pulls the trigger, thus severing his spinal cord and rendering him paralyzed for the rest of his life.

• 14:05Roman Mars?

  While this is all happening, the conductor pulls the emergency brake and the train comes to a halt.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  So the train has stopped on the tracks in the darkness between, somewhere between 14th Street and Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. Now, at that moment, Gatz appeared calm to passengers and appeared almost poised, but he ultimately, knowing that the train would be swarmed with police in a matter of moments, just fled, jumped off the train, ran through the subway platform with his gun, took a cab home, rented a car, and fled to New Hampshire.

• 14:47Roman Mars?

  The boys are hoisted out of the train and rushed to the hospital. All four were badly wounded, but Daryl Kaby is the worst off, in a coma with a bullet in his spinal cord. He and Barry Allen are hurried into the operating room.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  And meanwhile, back on the train, the police are trying to make sense of what in the world just happened. And so what are they left with? They're left with the clothing of the boys who have been stripped so that they can be attended to medically. And the police discover that in the pockets of two of these young men, in particular, it was Daryl Kaby and James Ramsor, that they have screwdrivers. And initially, when they pull these screwdrivers out and they note them, they catalog them, there'd been no reason to think they'd ever been taken out, they were secured in their jackets, and that was kind of the end of it.

• 15:39Roman Mars?

  The police logged the screwdrivers, but they don't think of them as relevant yet. Meanwhile, the whole system begins to mobilize to figure out what the boys could have done to justify the shooting.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  They're casting about, combing the records to figure out what in the world record must these teenagers have? Because surely, they must be criminals. Surely, they must be responsible for the fact that they themselves now have bullet holes in them. And they quickly realize that these teenagers have racked up a series of misdemeanor citations over the previous years.

• 16:20Roman Mars?

  They'd been caught jumping the turnstile to avoid paying the subway fare and trying to steal quarters from an arcade. All the citations were minor. If it weren't for the Getz case, none of those charges would ever bring them to court.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  But within a very short period of time, two Bronx judges make the executive decision that they're going to suddenly issue a blizzard of warrants for these teenagers' arrest.

• 16:48Roman Mars?

  Meanwhile, the police are looking for Bernie so they can question him too.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  The search goes on today for the so-called subway vigilante.

• 16:57Roman Mars?

  But already, the public isn't even sure the police should be doing that.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  Police reported receiving more than 500 calls praising the man who shot the teenagers.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Bernie Getz is celebrated by ordinary people. They champion him. They decide that he's innocent even before they know his name. They are furious that the DA's office will even consider prosecuting him.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Before Bernard Getz was identified, the New York Post started calling him the quote, "Death Wish Vigilante." That's the nickname they gave him. And they started running graphics about "The Death Wish Vigilante," after Charles Bronson, the protagonist of the movie Death Wish.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  So, long before Bernie Getz had pulled that trigger, they were already really being primed with this rhetoric to identify with Bernie Getz. Bernie Getz, he's just minding his own business. He's a hardworking guy. He's a small business owner.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  Bernie was a regular guy. You know what I mean? He's a regular guy. There's no big thing about him, you know?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  And he gets on that train, and four black thugs are gonna try to harm him. And so, that's all they need to know, right?

• 18:09Speaker 05

  Getz did the people of the city of New York a great favor.

• 18:13Speaker 06

  If it was me, I would have killed the guy. I mean, if it was me and I had to defend myself, I would have done exactly the same thing. I think he did right. They tried to mug him.

• 18:21Roman Mars?

  They're not kids. They're monsters.

• 18:25Roman Mars?

  But there's one detail in this story, one piece of misinformation that really started to stand out, and it had to do with those screwdrivers.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  Police say the teenagers had arrest records and three were carrying long screwdrivers. Police say the boys were armed with sharpened screwdrivers.

• 18:41Roman Mars?

  Now, the media was reporting that even though the boys didn't have guns, they had weapons in the form of screwdrivers. And not just screwdrivers, sharpened ones.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  These were not sharpened screwdrivers. These were regular screwdrivers that they needed to jimmy open the coin receptacles at the local arcade.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  And it's not just the use of the sharpened screwdrivers, but the use of the term "armed." The narrative that the four young men were armed with screwdrivers is itself a fiction. There was never any screwdriver shown to, brandished, or made available to Bernard Getz at any time. It is simply not true.

• 19:25Roman Mars?

  But that didn't matter. After the New York Daily News reported it, its talloid competitor, the New York Post, doubled down.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Every major paper ran with this notion that the screwdrivers were sharpened.

• 19:41Speaker 05

  Police say they did find several sharpened screwdrivers in the coat pockets of the victims. According to police, carried sharpened, heavy-duty screwdrivers.

• 19:50Roman Mars?

  And each time another news story mentioned it, it became more and more real.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  Four black teenagers wielding sharpened screwdrivers pressed him for $5.

• 20:00Roman Mars?

  Eventually, even major mainstream publications like The New York Times and Time Magazine ran with this detail.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  All you knew was a white guy that had shot four black teenagers who were armed with sharpened screwdrivers. And that stuck, and it taps into a long-running narrative in the United States over lifting up vigilantes and vigilante behavior.

• 20:26Roman Mars?

  Still, even as these news stories are circulating, there's a big piece of the puzzle missing. Bernie, who had been on the lam for nine days, still needed to be questioned, and he was about to finally emerge and give his own version of events.

• 20:49Roman Mars?

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• 21:29Roman Mars?

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• 21:58Roman Mars?

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• 22:31Roman Mars?

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• 23:06Roman Mars?

  After nine days of traipsing around the snowy backroads of Vermont and New Hampshire, Bernie Getz finally decides to turn himself in. He walks into the police station in Concord, New Hampshire and starts talking. Mr. Getz, this is all on videotape. Sure.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Nothing that's said in this room is off the videotape. It's for your protection and for ours. When he turns himself in, he voluntarily waves his right to a lawyer and he proceeds to give a two-hour videotaped confession. And in that, he pulls no punches. I wanted to kill those guys. I wanted to maim those guys. I wanted to make them suffer in every way I could. If I had more bullets, I would have shot.

• 23:48Speaker 05

  Again and again, my problem was I ran out of bullets and I was gonna, I was gonna gouge one of the guys' eyes out with my keys afterwards.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  He makes clear that robbery had nothing to do with it.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  Look, they didn't have weapons.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  And he says this a few times, even when the DA, you know, clearly mystified as to why he would have done it. It's almost like people are throwing him a lifeline. Well, you know, is it because you were mugged, you know, you know, a few years earlier? He says, no, it had nothing to do with that, you know. Were you being robbed? And he's, no.

• 24:24Roman Mars?

  He even admits to going up to Daryl Kaybee, who was cowering in his seat, and saying a line that shocks me every time I hear it.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  When I saw this one fellow, when I saw the gleam in his eye and the smile on his face, I went to him the second time. And I looked at him. And I said, you seem to be doing all right. Here's another.

• 24:51Roman Mars?

  Bernie was fed up with the city, with the boys, and he decided to take matters into his own hands. He had admitted to all of it. The question now was, would that matter?

• 25:05Roman Mars?

  More than two years after the shooting, the case finally went to court. Bernie faced a 13-count indictment. And on paper, it looked like a slam dunk for prosecutors.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  On the one hand, you have a prosecutor who has everything on his side. He's got Bernie Getz's confession. He's got very badly injured victims. You know, the facts are on his side. But Bernie Getz is already winning in the court of public opinion. And he has hired a very, very important lawyer by the name of Barry Slotnick, who was gonna, in effect, bamboozle the jury.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Barry Slotnick couldn't have been more out of central casting. When you think of the kind of glitzy showbiz type attorney, Barry Slotnick was it. He had tailored Italian suits. He had jewelry, the tie tack. He had a alligator skin briefcase in each hand. He's chauffeured in a Cadillac. He smoked cigarettes. He had represented many high profile members, I believe of the Colombo crime family. So he was a mob lawyer.

• 26:20Roman Mars?

  So on one side, you have this shiny mob lawyer representing Bernie Getz. And on the other, there's the prosecutor tasked with proving the boys were the victims. And the jury is waiting to hear from both sides. You know, when you describe the contours of the case to anyone, they have a hard time coming up with what the defense is going to be. But could you boil it down for me? What was the sort of nature of the defense's case?

• 26:45Speaker 03

  The defense's case was multifold. I think the big part of it is, and Barry Slotnick says this in his opening statement, I am going to put these young men on trial. And frankly, I don't think he called them young men. It was thugs and hoodlums and savages and whatever else. He framed it as a gang, a street gang that sought to terrorize, if not Bernard Getz, whoever was the next unlucky victim of their vicious path.

• 27:10Roman Mars?

  The judge banned explicit talk of race at the trial, but race was always front of mind.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  They never said black. They never said it, but they used language of savages, thugs, animals, monsters, hoodlums. The defense was not shy about doing everything they possibly could to stoke the racial biases of the jury.

• 27:32Roman Mars?

  And it wasn't just the language he used. One of the first things Slotnick and his team did was deliberately seek out photographs where the young men looked their most menacing.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  Giant 24 by 36 or whatever, black and white posters of these four young men, in which the young men just didn't look friendly. Yeah.

• 27:53Roman Mars?

  Slotnik even put those pictures on easels in front of the jury.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  For no reason. Remember, these are victims. These were not perpetrators or criminals. This isn't evidence. But every day when they walked in, these menacing looking photographs of these four young black men would be staring at the jury because they wanted the jury to see who these men were and draw their own conclusions from that.

• 28:17Roman Mars?

  Then about a month into the trial, Slotnik pulled out the big guns.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  One morning, they went into court and taped out a model of the train car on the floor of the courtroom.

• 28:28Roman Mars?

  Slotnik was staging what was supposed to be a reenactment of the shooting. But very quickly, it was clear that almost nothing about it resembled what actually happened.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  They brought in four of the meanest looking black guys they could find and dressed them up in dirty jeans and white t-shirts and had them represent the four young men.

• 28:50Roman Mars?

  So the representation of the boys was already inaccurate. But they also didn't try to replicate any of the other conditions on the train that day. The recreation didn't show any of the other passengers who had been there. And instead of trying to recreate where the boys were actually sitting or standing, the four actors were directed to stand in a semicircle around the stand-in for Bernie Getz.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Think of all of the various factors that would have been at play. But all it was was a taped out model of the car with four mean looking black teenagers grabbing and tugging and shoving and pulling the model, Bernard Getz.

• 29:27Roman Mars?

  The judge eventually stopped the demonstration.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  But the damage was done. The jury saw what the defense wanted them to see, which was four young black men beating up a white man. And that's it.

• 29:38Roman Mars?

  In essence, this is how most of the trial goes. The defense continued to use racialized language and stereotypes to amp up the jurors' larger fears and anxieties about the city. And to use all of this to prove that Bernie was acting in self-defense, that he was reasonable to think that he was about to be robbed or mugged. They even explained away his confession.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  The defense made the decision, a very risky one, but said that this was a frightened man. And even though he's openly confessing he was unambiguous, and I intended to murder these men and to make them suffer as possible. Those were his words. But because he was scared and out of his mind, that meant that we should discredit the words that come out of his mouth. It was very risky, but ultimately, the strategy paid off.

• 30:32Roman Mars?

  In June 1987, the jury acquitted Bernie Getz of the most serious charges against him. Not guilty of attempted murder, not guilty of assaulting the four boys. The only thing he was held accountable for was the possession of illegal firearms. And in the end, he only served eight months.

• 30:52Roman Mars?

  What is the sort of basic legal reason for the jury? Just explain to me why the jury, you know, voted not to convict him.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  The legal reason goes back to this question of reasonableness. The law in the state of New York says one can use deadly or lethal force if he reasonably believes he's about to be a victim of a robbery. And after doing that analysis, the jury felt that Getz was reasonably afraid. And they think that what they were simply doing was applying the law, saying, in a rough environment, in a rough city, this individual was reasonable in his belief that a mugging might have been imminent.

• 31:40Roman Mars?

  The Getz case actually set a new legal precedent around that question. When is it reasonable for someone to act in self-defense? Before the case, the New York State Legislature hadn't clearly defined what reasonable meant.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  And the question was, is reasonableness subjective? In the sense that if you genuinely feel scared in your heart, that's enough. I feel scared, therefore, I can use deadly force. Or objective, I'm going to use deadly force. And that tracks with how we would assume other people in society would behave. That compares my behavior to everyone else's. And those are two different ways that courts around the country had grappled with how to use the term.

• 32:25Roman Mars?

  This question is so contentious, it actually goes up to the highest court in New York, which decides once and for all to clarify it. Technically, they say you have to consider both things, what the person was afraid of and what an average reasonable person would be afraid of. But as we see in the Bernie Getz case, even considering that definition of reasonable, what the average person might do, still ultimately comes down to a very subjective opinion. This measure of reasonableness seems to have just, I don't know, we seem to accept a lot of more of this.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. We have no evidence to suggest that a robbery was imminent, but the mere fact that one might have sincerely thought that a mugging was coming would have allowed him to kill them under the law. Like, if he'd succeeded and actually committed the act, consummated the act of homicide, that would have been protected under New York law. And, which is just sort of, it's one of the realities of the American conception of self-defense that we don't ever really stop to think about, which might lead to innocent people getting shot preemptively. And we, as a society, sort of make peace with that.

• 33:36Roman Mars?

  So if that's the legal reason why Getz got off, do you have a take on what the real reason was? Like, what do people say?

• 33:45Speaker 03

  It's both my knowledge of the system and cynicism as a former prosecutor. And I would say, honestly, the jury saw themselves in Bernard Getz. Another jury could easily have convicted him of attempted murder, starting with the fact that he says on the record to police knowingly and voluntarily, "I intended to murder them." In an attempted murder trial, that's a confession. And so this idea that he was scared and out of his mind means that we should discredit the words that come out of his mouth is, to me, that's just ludicrous, that's nonsense. But they saw themselves in him.

• 34:25Roman Mars?

  Ten of the 12 jury members were white. Half of the jury had actually been victims of crime, some of them on the subway. They were primed to see themselves in Getz and to see the boys as attackers. And if you believe the papers, attackers wielding sharpened screwdrivers.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Every single serious source who have looked at this has debunked the sharpened screwdrivers theory. And again, that to me extends not just to whether they were sharpened, but the use of the term armed when referring to the teenagers. Because number one, we know the purpose for which they had the screwdrivers. And number two, we know that they at no point attempted to even threaten to use them with respect to Bernard Getz.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  And yet, at the end of the day, in a narrative very familiar to today that we all inhabit, the facts won't matter because people will want to somehow exonerate him anyway.

• 35:30Roman Mars?

  In the same way that the Getz case acted as a kind of stress test for the legal definitions behind self-defense, it was also a testing ground for something else. In the late 70s, Rupert Murdoch, then an ambitious conservative media mogul, came to the States with the dream of dominating the US market, starting with buying the New York Post.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  And he quickly understands that one of the most important things that you need when you're going to dominate a media market is you need readers. And one of the easiest ways to get readers is to kind of keep hitting them with salacious stories that just baffle them and defy imagination. I'll give you just one example of that that just exemplifies this moment so well. A reporter from the New York Post was later interviewed about the reporting in the Post in these years. And this reporter gave an example of how there'd be an event and a Post reporter would be on the scene and sort of ask the police officer, like a crime, and say, do you know what happened? You know, who are your suspects? What's going on?

• 36:34Speaker 02

  And the police officers, they know we're still investigating it. And the reporter would say, well, you know, have you ruled out this? Have you ruled out that? And like, you know, have you ruled out a homosexual angle? And of course, the police officer is like, look, we haven't ruled out anything. You know, we're still investigating. And then the headline would be homosexual angle not ruled out in this crime. Right? So, you know, the Bernie Getz case was really ground zero for this in New York City. And really the nation, because Rupert Murdoch's New York Post will become Fox News. And Bernie Getz will become that every man, that resentful, rage-filled every man,

• 37:14Speaker 02

  that over time will be allowed to do whatever he wants, even legally, as long as he just says he felt threatened.

• 37:25Roman Mars?

  In the decades after, we have had more people enacting the death wish fantasy, taking their idea of justice into their own hands. In 2012, George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, saw a black teenager in a dark hoodie walking down the street. Zimmerman said he thought the teen was casing the area, looking for houses to rob. But rather than wait for police, Zimmerman got out of his car and gunned down 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Trayvon had no weapons, only a bag of Skittles in his pocket.

• 38:01Roman Mars?

  In 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse showed up at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15-style rifle. He said he went to protect local businesses, to do what he thought law enforcement could not. Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two and wounding another.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  The modern day version of this kind of unleashing of rage and violence is perhaps not surprisingly much more extreme. How can it be that Kyle Rittenhouse can literally show up at a protest, guns in hand, and shoot three people, kill people, and have people celebrate him?

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Kyle Rittenhouse struck us as bright, decent, sincere, dutiful, and hardworking. Exactly the kind of person you'd want many more of in your country.

• 38:52Roman Mars?

  Then in 2023, Daniel Penny, a former Marine, got on the same New York City subway as Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unarmed black man. Neely was in the middle of a mental health crisis, and he began to shout and act erratically. Penny grabbed Neely from behind, brought him to the ground, and placed him in a chokehold for several minutes.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Daniel Penny, like Bernie Getz, deemed some threatening and killed him.

• 39:20Roman Mars?

  And here, just like the other two cases, the same thing happened. They all claimed self-defense, and they're all lionized.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  Daniel Penny was a good Samaritan, put his own life at risk. I think he deserves a medal. New York needs this.

• 39:37Roman Mars?

  And this support, it doesn't stop with conservative media. It reaches beyond to billionaire businessmen, even the President of the United States.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  Just put on your imagination hat and imagine if Daniel Penny is a black man and Jordan Neely is a white man. Daniel Penny kills Jordan Neely in a chokehold. Close your eyes and imagine, does Donald Trump invite him to sit in his private box at the Army-Navy game weeks later, after his acquittal? And I think the answer is no. Does Andreessen Horowitz, the most prestigious venture capital firm on the planet, give him a job offer days after his acquittal? And I think, again, the answer is no.

• 40:25Roman Mars?

  In the end, all three men are acquitted of all assault charges, just as Bernie Getz had been. In fact, in the Penny case, when the jury asked for clarification on the question of what was reasonable, the judge specifically referred them back to the precedent set in the Getz trial. And that's not the only way that Bernie keeps coming up in these vigilante cases.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  He is still very much lionized. He was asked what he thought about Kyle Rittenhouse's verdict. He was asked what he thought about Daniel Penny's verdict. He's still able to be the hero of his story.

• 41:01Roman Mars?

  While Bernie Getz is still invoked again and again, the four teenagers have sort of disappeared.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, James Ramsour is dead. He killed himself on one of the anniversaries of the shooting.

• 41:15Roman Mars?

  Things weren't much better for his three friends. In 1996, KB's family did win a civil suit against Getz. They were awarded $43 million in damages, but they never received a penny. Getz soon declared bankruptcy and KB receded from the news. Barry Allen died too, after years of struggling with drug addiction.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Troy Canty is the only one of the four who managed to eke out some kind of an independent life afterwards. And, um, and he doesn't want to talk to anybody very understandably because he doesn't trust that his story will actually be honored.

• 42:00Roman Mars?

  And what happened with the myth of the sharpened screwdriver?

• 42:04Speaker 02

  The myth of the sharpened screwdriver remains.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Bernard Getz, as recently as Kyle Rittenhouse, was in an interview referring to the sharpened screwdrivers.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  The sharpened screwdrivers are evoked to explain why Bernie Getz had done what he did.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  It was just a narrative that took off from the first day. And now, 42 years later, it still is not really back in the bag.

• 42:47Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Ellie Lightfoot. Our other producers are Priscilla Alabi and Brenna Daldorf. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon King. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Cathy Too. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé. And the production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.

• 43:32Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcasts family headquartered in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

• 44:27Speaker 04

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