From the archives: Ferguson was 'bomb waiting to explode'

This story was originally published in Newsday on Dec. 9, 1993.

Colin Ferguson is a man who raged against personal demons.

When a Manhattan attorney rejected a legal complaint he submitted, she said he issued veiled death threats.

When he was charged with elbowing a woman in a Manhattan subway and screaming curses, he accused transit cops of waging a racist campaign against him.

When he felt he was the victim of racial prejudice by Adelphi University, he angrily tried to sue.

When his Brooklyn landlady said he'd been acting strangely and told him to move, he sputtered about kidney stones and unspecified ailments.

When dissatisfied with a successful workers' compensation claim, he challenged the ruling as unfair and continued to seek a better settlement hours before the slaughter.

And when on an unsuccessful job-hunting trip to California, he used his motel address to buy what police say was a mass-murder handgun.

Ferguson's aggressive behavior - from loud Bible prayer in the nighttime solitude of his Brooklyn room to complaints about an ex-wife he said "took everything I had" to screaming jags that disrupted college discussions - left a sense of foreboding with many of those who encountered the heavy-set man of 35 who habitually went about his life behind dark sunglasses.

"He'd been acting funny," Carmen Denis, the accused killer's Flatbush landlady, said yesterday. "He said he thought he would not live long. He felt he would die young."

An Adelphi student leader put it more bluntly, calling Ferguson "a bomb waiting to explode."

The detonator apparently went off Tuesday night, when police say Ferguson unleashed a random hail of 9mm bullets in the Long Island Rail Road's crowded 5:33 p.m. homebound commuter run to Hicksville, killing five and wounding 20.

Along with the carnage, Ferguson left investigators seeking clues in a puzzling trail that featured bouts of anger and placid routine. As detectives worked, associates, acquaintances, investigators, government officials and public records provided a partial portrait of a Jamaican immigrant who sought the American dream and became the accused architect of a suburban nightmare.

There was no sign of the tragedy to come back in Kingston, Jamaica, where Colin Alfred Ferguson was born on Jan. 14, 1958. Joseph Earle, principal of Calabar High School, said the schoolboy Ferguson was an average student who lived in the Meadowbrook section, a neighborhood of working-class families, and attended a Presbyterian church.

Earle said school records show Ferguson played soccer and cricket and was "a bit talkative," someone who engaged in lively conversations with other students. He graduated near the middle of his class in 1974.

His father, Von Herman Ferguson, was a pharmacist who died in a 1978 head-on collision. His mother, May, died sometime later, leaving Ferguson and four brothers on their own.

Immigration records show Ferguson entered the United States in Miami in September, 1982, with a renewable visitor's visa. Sometime that year he went to California, where he obtained a Social Security number.

Four years later, Ferguson married an American woman and became a permanent U.S. resident. Around this time, according to records and associates, he was living in a series of apartments in Nassau County. One former landlord, from 1987 to 1988 in Westbury, described a series of misfortunes.

Ferguson's wife left him, said the former landlord, who asked not to be identified. He fell off a ladder and injured his back, and lost his clerical job. Finally, the former landlord was forced to evict him. Discussing the killings yesterday, the man said: "It can't be Colin Ferguson. He wouldn't hurt a fly."

Still, others recalled his anger at grievances.

John Adams, former vice president for academic and student services at Nassau Community College in Garden City, said Ferguson was unhappy about a failing grade he received at the school, which he attended in the late 1980s and 1990, and where he earned a place on the dean's list at least once.

"He was very, very persistent. He wanted to constantly talk about it, and he wanted people to fix it exactly the way he wanted it, as I recall," Adams said.

Other disputes arose at Adelphi, also in Garden City, where Ferguson enrolled as a business administration major for the 1990-1991 academic year. University spokesman Vince Passaro said he was suspended for unspecified "disciplinary reasons." Sources said the suspension came after he had threatened at least one faculty member. A black student leader said Ferguson felt he was the victim of discrimination.

"Racism did exist in many cases," said the student leader, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But [Ferguson] was obsessed that racism was the cause of why he was having problems. He couldn't stand the university . . . He disrupted any event that he attended . . . He would stand up and scream."

State records show Ferguson filed a workers' compensation claim in April, 1989, for lower-back injuries he received when he slipped off a stool and fell at a job with Ademco Security Group, a Long Island manufacturer of electronic alarm and security systems. The New York Workers' Compensation Board awarded him $ 75 in continuing benefits for a partial disability and in 1992 approved lump sum payments of $ 21,450 and $ 4,800.

The board agreed to reconsider the case when Ferguson complained, but he rejected the panel's directions to undergo physical examinations by impartial medical specialists. Instead, he repeatedly telephoned a toll-free line established by Gov. Mario Cuomo's office for state residents with complaints.

"People said he sounded intelligent and was almost always polite and extremely persistent," Anne Crowley, Cuomo's press secretary, said yesterday.

Government officials said he also kept up a stream of phone calls to workers' compensation officials, speaking with Frank Ryan, an employee in the board's Brooklyn office, just hours before the shooting. Ryan said Ferguson was extremely polite during the call. "He said, 'Thank you, Mr. Ryan,' as he always did," Ryan said in an interview last night.

Even as he pursued the compensation dispute, he turned to a succession of attorneys with other complaints, including a February, 1992, arrest. According to transit police, Ferguson elbowed a woman and shouted threatening profanities aboard an IRT No. 1 train as it neared the Times Square stop. She alerted the train conductor, who called for assistance. Transit cops arrested Ferguson after a struggle and charged him with aggravated harassment.

Brooklyn attorney Colin Moore said Ferguson wanted to file a lawsuit accusing Adelphi of racism. Ferguson gave Moore his car, a 1985 Buick, as collateral for taking the case. But the attorney said Ferguson later took his car back and accused Moore of laughing at him with other lawyers in court.

"At that point I recognized something was wrong," Moore said yesterday. "He was kind of strange because he was a very presentable guy, good looking and so forth, and he spoke kind of articulately. But after a period of time he brought up bizarre things."

Court records show Ferguson turned to Manhattan Legal Aid lawyer Mark Martin for representation on the subway harassment case. In a Dec. 3, 1992, letter to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Ferguson accused police of singling him out for racial harassment.

In the letter, he charged that official records "revealed the racism and corruption within your agency, as you attempt to deny Mr. Ferguson the fundamental guarantees provided for under our system."

The subway case was ultimately dismissed for reasons police could not immediately explain yesterday.

Another attorney described uneasiness over legal complaints Ferguson presented for filing. Lauren Abramson said he came to her lower Manhattan office with a complaint she declined to describe. Concerned by what she said was a tangled identity he offered for himself, Abramson declined to represent him.

Shortly afterward, she said, Ferguson called and told one of Abramson's colleagues "he was going to come to the office and kill me or something. . . . We kept watch and notified the police."

By the spring of this year, the would-be client had the means to make good on the alleged threat. Nick Bhakta, the manager of Royal Motel, a nine-room complex in Long Beach, Calif., said Ferguson moved in for three weeks on April 22. California records show he listed the motel address to obtain a driver's license from the state.

According to investigators, Ferguson used his California residency to buy the automatic handgun used in the railroad massacre.

In May, said Bhakta, Ferguson checked out, saying he had been unable to find a job. He returned to what Flatbush neighbors and residents, Denis, his landlady at 226 Martense St., and others described as a familiar cycle of arguments and complaints.

Several neighbors said Ferguson, usually wearing dark sunglasses, at times started confrontations at the local S.P. Osborne laundry.

Denis said Ferguson spent long hours in his sparse quarters, a $ 175-a-month room on the second floor of her small private home. There, she said, he brought Chinese food in for dinner on most nights, and prayed from the Bible in a voice loud enough to prompt wondering remarks from neighbors.

He also drew up a litany of complaints that targeted such things as the "sloppy running" of the IRT No. 2 train, Cuomo's office, workers' compensation employees and well-known black leaders such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, the Rev. Calvin Butts and attorney C. Vernon Mason. All said they had no idea what prompted Ferguson's rage against them.

Denis, concerned by what she described as Ferguson's "strange" actions and predictions he would die an early death, said she told him last month he would have to move.

Tuesday afternoon, she said, Ferguson left his room sometime after 4 p.m., announcing he would be back later. She didn't see him again. Instead, she was awakened at 2 a.m. yesterday by the knocks of detectives who searched the accused killer's room.

"I was so shocked when they told me what happened," Denis said. "These people were coming home from work, trying to make a decent living, and look what he did to them."

The Suspect's Notes

These are the notes police found when they arrested Colin Ferguson. The notes, which are in no particular order, include references and partial references to employees in the Governor's Office, the outgoing mayor and police commissioner of New York City, a variety of public agencies, lawyers, landlords and civil rights leaders:

* CAUSE

Kim Gold
1(800)828-2338

Susan Whitely
1(800)828-2338

Lt Gov 2 WTC
(212) 417-5640.

Att Generals Office
Compensation Appeals

NYC was spared because of my respect for Mayor David Dinkins and Comm Raymond Kelley who officially still in office.

Nassau County is the venue

Also that Chinese racist Mr. Sue will never put me to shame again without cause*.

Reasons for this:

Adelphi University's racism

The EEOC's racism

Workers' Compensation's racism

NYC Transit

Police

NYC Police

The racism of Gov Cuomo's staff and exec chamber

The racism of the Lt. Governor's staff and exec chamber This includes Susan Whitely and Carol Goestrel.

Additional reasons for this:

The sloppy running of the number 2 train It is racism by Caucasians

The most significant change in the Knicks since their franchise record-setting 7-0 start has been their shooting. A comparison of then and now:

FG-FGA FG Pct. OR/TR TO Pts.
First 7 279-561 49.7 11.9/40.9 16.9 102.6
Last 8 299-677 44.2 15.4/48.5 15.9 98.6
Total 578-1238 46.7 13.7/44.9 16.3 100.5

REPLAY

A championship in the offing? The Knicks during the other two title years.

1969 / After 15 Games: The Knicks (14-1) beat the Lakers, 112-102, on