On the evening of December 7, 1993, a Long Island Rail Road commuter train left Penn Station in Manhattan for the suburbs of Nassau County, full of people going home from work. As it neared the Merillon Avenue station in Garden City, a passenger named Colin Ferguson killed six of his fellow riders and injured 19 more, all within a few minutes. Three passengers seized him and held him until an off-duty railroad police officer could put him in handcuffs.
Ferguson was a Jamaican-born immigrant who lived in Brooklyn. He had no job and a long record of quarrels with institutions. Over the next fourteen months his case drew national attention, less because of any doubt about what had happened on the train than because of what happened in the courtroom. Found competent to stand trial, he dismissed the lawyers who wanted to argue that he was not legally sane, took over his own defense and questioned the survivors himself. On February 17, 1995, a Nassau County jury convicted him on 68 of the 93 counts against him, including murder in the second degree. He has been in the custody of the State of New York ever since.
Ferguson came to the United States from Jamaica and settled in New York. His years there were marked by grievance. He worked for a time as a stock clerk and studied at Adelphi University on Long Island, and he fell into a long series of disputes with the people and agencies around him, among them the state workers' compensation board and university officials. By December 1993 he was living in Brooklyn.
The train was an evening rush-hour run bound for Hicksville, one that many of its riders took every working day. The killings took place in Nassau County, just outside the New York City line, as the train approached Merillon Avenue.
Six passengers died. Dennis McCarthy was among them, and so was James Gorycki. Amy Federici died, as did Mi Kyung Kim. Two more passengers were killed. Nineteen people survived their injuries, and many of them would later face Ferguson again in court.
The men who ended it were passengers too. Three riders took hold of him and kept him down until the train stopped at Merillon Avenue, where an off-duty officer of the railroad's police handcuffed him. Police found handwritten notes on him, expressing hatred and listing grievances against Adelphi University and others.
Nassau County prosecutors brought a 93-count indictment. Alongside murder and attempted murder, it charged reckless endangerment, two further offenses and hate crime counts, which turned on the claim that he had chosen his victims by race.
Two noted defense lawyers, appointed by the court, took on his defense. They proposed a defense rooted in psychiatry and race: that a society biased against him had affected his mind, and that he was not legally sane when he killed the passengers. A psychiatrist retained by the defense found him delusional. The strategy accepted that Ferguson had done the killing, and Ferguson rejected it. He dismissed the two lawyers.
They did not let the matter rest. Ferguson had never allowed any lawyer to argue his insanity in court, and his former lawyers pointed to that refusal as evidence that he could not make rational decisions about his own defense. They asked the court to assess whether he was competent to make those decisions. The court found that he was competent to stand trial.
Ferguson then announced that he would represent himself, and the trial judge allowed it. One of his former lawyers sat in as an assistant. Ferguson said he would rather be convicted than judged insane.
His defense was that he was innocent and had been framed. He told the court that he had fallen asleep on the train and that an unidentified white passenger had done the killing.
The trial took place in the Nassau County courthouse in Mineola. It was widely televised, and it drew attention because the man accused of the killings questioned, in person, the people he was accused of trying to kill.
The prosecution built its case on the survivors. One after another, passengers from the train took the stand and identified Ferguson as the man responsible. Ferguson cross-examined them himself, asking each in turn about the man they had seen.
The jury deliberated for about ten hours. On February 17, 1995, it returned its verdict: guilty on 68 of the 93 counts, among them murder in the second degree and attempted murder. It acquitted him of the hate crime charges. In the jurors' judgment, the evidence did not show that he had chosen his victims by race.
The sentencing hearing lasted three days, because so many of the injured and the families of the dead asked to address the court. Ferguson spoke at length as well. On March 22, 1995, the trial judge imposed six consecutive terms of 25 years to life, one for each death, together with the 50-year maximum on the 19 counts of attempted murder, the two further counts and the count of reckless endangerment. The combined term ran to about two centuries. The judge ordered him taken directly into state custody. As he was led out of the courtroom in shackles, Ferguson said, "I'm innocent. I plan to appeal."
Ferguson has served his sentence in New York state prisons, and his conduct there has kept him out of view. In 2013 the state corrections department said he was barred from face-to-face interviews because of a disciplinary record that included sanctions for violent conduct and rioting. In April 2014 a panel of the Appellate Division upheld a prison disciplinary finding against him, holding that videotape, testimony and a misbehavior report gave substantial evidence that he had threatened violence and conspired to riot. Under the terms of his sentence, his first parole eligibility lies nearly three centuries away. In December 2023, thirty years after the killings, he remained in New York state custody serving that sentence.
Ferguson's claim at trial that another passenger committed the killings was rejected by the jury, which heard the survivors identify him. The bias counts were not proved: the jury acquitted him of the hate crime charges, and they form no part of his conviction. His mental state was argued by others on his behalf but never put before the jury as a defense, because he refused to allow it.
December 7, 1993: Six passengers are killed and 19 injured on an evening Long Island Rail Road train near the Merillon Avenue station in Garden City; passengers restrain Ferguson and an off-duty railroad police officer takes him into custody.
1994: Found competent to stand trial, he dismisses his lawyers, rejects an insanity defense and is permitted to represent himself.
February 17, 1995: After about ten hours of deliberation, the jury in Mineola convicts him on 68 of 93 counts, including murder in the second degree, and acquits him of hate crime charges.
March 22, 1995: Sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life plus further terms.
April 24, 2014: The Appellate Division upholds a prison disciplinary finding against him.
December 2023: He remains in New York state custody serving his sentence.