Colin Ferguson, born January 14, 1958 in Jamaica, was a mass murderer who shot and killed six people on a Long Island Rail commuter train. Nineteen others were injured in the shooting. This incident, on December 7, 1993, would come to be known as the Long Island Railroad Massacre.
Ferguson, who had some partiality towards New York City’s mayor and did not want to cause trouble in his area of the state, took a train to Nassau County. He waited until the train was out of range of Mayor Dinkins’ territory before he opened fire. He was overpowered by passengers after shooting at many people and stopping – he had needed to reload his firearm.
Ferguson’s case went to trial. In an unusual turn of events, Ferguson broke the mold of typical legal procedure and did something legally inadvisable: he represented himself in court, rather than get any legal representation. He claimed that he was the victim of racist conspiracies, and that it had been “a case of stereotyped victimization of a black man and the subsequent conspiracy to destroy him.” Ferguson, despite witness reports of the shooting, actually claimed that someone had taken his gun and used it to shoot the people before framing him. In return, the court found him guilty and served him with a 200-year sentence.
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