From the archives: The LIRR slaughter: Nightmare aboard car 3

This story was originally published in Newsday on Dec. 12, 1993.

Robert Giugliano, red-eyed from a 12-hour day poring over electrical blueprints, emerged from his Manhattan office on West 36th Street and headed downtown through the dark December evening. He was eager to make his usual train, the 5:33 p.m. to Hicksville.

Giugliano hustled through the rush-hour throng, swelled by Christmas shoppers, picking up his pace as he neared the Eighth Avenue entrance of Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station. If he caught the 5:33, he'd soon be home in Franklin Square with his wife, Donna, and their three daughters, stringing lights and hanging Christmas decorations.

At Penn Station, Giugliano joined the hundreds of people flowing down the stairs, drawn downward as if into a drain from which the stopper had been removed. At days' end, the tide that had brought Long Islanders westward for work had reversed.

From all over the city on Tuesday, Dec. 7, people converged on Track 15, where the 5:33 left most days.

Among them was Patrick Fagan, a 37-year-old computer technician from Garden City Park, who greeted Giugliano at their usual spot on the platform, where the third car would open its doors. As was their custom, the two men chatted, complaining about how crowded the 5:33 always was.

Maybe, Fagan suggested, they should start taking the 6:08.

"The 6:08 always has lots of seats," Fagan said.

"Compared to this, it's a dream. "

Dennis McCarthy, a burly, 52-year-old administrator at Prudential Securities in midtown, was already waiting when Giugliano and Fagan arrived. He could have caught an earlier train, but lingered at the station so he could ride home to Mineola with his 26-year-old son, Kevin, who six months earlier had begun working for Prudential in a
downtown office.

Tonight the two men - growing close through their daily commute after years of father-son stresses - planned to bring the Christmas tree in from the driveway so that Carolyn McCarthy, Dennis' wife and Kevin's mother, could decorate it.

Mi Kyung Kim, a 27-year-old supervisor at Columbia University's mathematics library, also had hurried to the platform. Kim, by all accounts a brilliant woman who hoped to find a job in computer animation, lived with her parents and two sisters in New Hyde Park.

Kim kept her office clocks synchronized to Penn Station time, so that at 5 p.m. sharp she could make the four-mile subway trip downtown to Penn Station in time for the 5:33 to carry her home to her family and her cat, Mabi. "I don't know what I'd do if Mabi died," she told her
sister, Mi Won Kim, 22, several times.

Shortly before the train's scheduled departure, the 12 cars of the 5:33 eased up to the platform. Giugliano and Fagan and Kim and the McCarthys and about 75 other people squeezed through the doors of the third car - men and women, executives and secretaries, bankers and
technicians.

Some, like Giugliano and Kim, were on this train - even on this car - on this evening as a result of a deeply grooved commuter habit.

Some were there as a result of chance - a missed connection, a spouse's evening plans, a whim to head home early. Carl Petersen, a 48-year-old banker, usually took the 6:08 back to Garden City, but boarded early this night to take his 13-year-old daughter to confirmation class. Stephen Attanasio, 34, vice president of a bond insurance company, also was taking an earlier train so his wife could attend a graduate class at St. John's University while he took care of their children.

As the train's doors closed with a pneumatic sigh and passengers settled into their seats, all those aboard had reason to believe that the hardest part of their day was now over.

But somewhere in the teeming darkness of the city, Colin Ferguson, 35, was also on the move. And the jagged line of his troubled life was on a course that would soon intersect the 5:33's eastward path.

Ferguson, a brooding, isolated man, lived in a one-room apartment in Flatbush, kept company only by a host of seething grievances against the world. His landlady had noticed that Ferguson had been "acting funny" lately, praying loudly from the Bible at night, complaining of pain from kidney stones.

On Tuesday, Ferguson left his room at 4 p.m. His landlady last saw him walking down the street, holding a brown paper bag.
* * *

As the train hissed away from Penn Station for its brief run underground, throwing off sparks, Giugliano placed his briefcase on his lap and reviewed the blueprints he'd been working on all day. Giugliano, a supervisor in an electrical contracting firm, had chosen an aisle seat toward the front of the car, a row behind Fagan, who dozed.

People in the crowded car were sleeping, reading newspapers, poring over documents. Petersen studied reviews of computer software. Dennis and Kevin McCarthy sat side by side in the back of the car.

It was their custom to chat all the way home, about their ski trips together, and about Kevin's new job at his father's company. In the six months they commuted together, Carolyn McCarthy said, "You could really see the bond developing between them. "

Giugliano continued to work on this trip home because he was excited about his company's bid to install the wiring in the new Andy Warhol Foundation offices. The job could keep the 25 employees of the Matros Electric Co. busy for months - quite a coup for a guy who'd worked there only four months.

Earlier this year, he'd been out of work, and with a mortgage and three daughters, he was now trying hard to prove himself.

"If we get this Andy Warhol job," he joked with co-workers before leaving that night, "that'll be my 15 minutes of fame."

About 20 minutes along its 56-minute trip to Hicksville, the 5:33 pulled into Jamaica , where additional passengers poured through the doors. Giugliano looked up from his papers when a young woman asked him, "Is this seat taken? "

The man next to him had exited. Giugliano smiled and said it was not. Marita (Theresa) Magtoto, 30, a lawyer, sat down next to him. "To be honest, she was so pretty that I kept looking at her," Giugliano said.

Magtoto had boarded at Jamaica as part of a circuitous loop to her Westbury home. Her commute actually began east, at a law office in Bay Shore. She had no car, and with no direct route from Bay Shore to Westbury, she usually took the LIRR west to Jamaica, and boarded the
Hicksville line going east.

A native of the Philippines, Magtoto and her husband, Myto, had moved to Westbury in September, because he was fearful of the dangers that might come with living in New York City. Friends recommended Long Island as a safe place to live.

Magtoto, whose father is secretary general of the Philippine senate, had passed the bar in both the Philippines and in New York. While she continued to look for the right job , she had begun working part-time at the law office of a friend of her father's.

On Tuesday, one of the firm's clients, Walter Bernstein, of Plainview, had offered to drive her home to Westbury because he knew about her complicated commute. She declined, Bernstein said, because her boss was away and "she didn't want to leave the office uncovered. "

As the train pulled out of Jamaica and continued eastward, another new passenger was in the third car. He was seated in the last row, on the right side of the aisle. He had a brown duffel bag on his lap.

Nassau County police believe that Colin Ferguson boarded the 5:33 at Jamaica, or at the previous station, at Woodside.

When the conductor came through the car, Ferguson handed him his ticket, which was for an off-peak ride. The conductor asked for an additional $1.50, and Ferguson handed him two dollar bills. He said nothing as the conductor gave him his 50 cents change.

In his bag, Ferguson had a 9-mm. semi-automatic pistol, and more than 100 rounds of ammunition.

He sat silently as the train sped through the night. From his seat, he had a full view of the car - 26 rows of people reading and sleeping and preparing to get home.

* * *

At about 6:08, the train pulled into New Hyde Park. Some passengers exited, and as the train pulled out, others stood up and made their way toward the doors. They included Stephen Attanasio and Louise Davellar of Freeport. They would get off at the next stop, Merillon Avenue, a short three minutes down the track.

It was then, as the train gathered speed again, that Colin Ferguson stood up.

Elizabeth Aviles, a 30-year-old paralegal sitting five rows forward, happened to look around. For a split second, Aviles thought she was dreaming.

"I thought I fell asleep and this wasn't happening," she said. "He stood and I saw him point his gun at everyone. I couldn't believe it. "

Another passenger, Lucinda Melkonian, 26, of Garden City, a sales coordinator for CBS, remembers hearing someone say, "This is real life, everybody. "

Police, after interviewing more than 75 passengers, say it's unclear if Ferguson ever spoke.

What is clear, police say, is that as Ferguson stood in the aisle, he pointed his pistol at the passenger immediately to his right, John Forni, 35,a certified public accountant from Garden City, and fired five times, wounding him in his chest, arm and face. Ferguson fired deliberately, holding the gun out in front of him and aiming as he pulled the trigger. He then wheeled the gun to his left and fired again, wounding Maryanne Phillips, 39, in the chest.

"Pop, pop, pop." The shots resounded down the length of the car. Passengers were startled into a confused alertness.

James Pagett, 50, who had been sleeping in his seat midway in the car, immediately thought that kids were pelting the train with rocks.

Attanasio, standing in a doorway, wondered if the train was having electrical problems. He peered out the window, expecting to see a shower
of sparks.

Kevin McHugh, 43, a customer service representative for Con Edison, thought first of paper bags being popped. "What the hell was that?" he wondered.

Petersen, a Vietnam veteran, immediately realized that the pops were gunfire. But at first, he thought the shots were being fired at the train from outside.

"Then the sound changed enough for my brain to tell me it was inside the car. " He turned around. In the aisle, he saw a large man holding a gun in two hands. Ferguson was firing into people at short range and walking forward, swinging the gun back and forth.

Muffled cries began to fill the car. "Oh God," and "He's got a gun. "

Ferguson took aim at Kevin McCarthy and Dennis McCarthy, shooting both, and continued advancing. Kevin McCarthy was grievously wounded as a bullet smashed into his head. He slumped over onto his father's chest. Dennis McCarthy was dead. His head lay on the shoulder of Leonard Schultheis, a passenger sitting next to him.

Schultheis was covered with the McCarthys' blood but was not hit as Ferguson continued forward.

In the front of the car, Giugliano made eye contact with his friend, Fagan, and swung his head around to look down the aisle. Ferguson's face, he said, wore "a kind of sick-looking grin, like he was stoned. It looked like he enjoyed what he was doing. "

Ferguson killed two more passengers, firing at short range into James Gorycki, 51, and Richard Nettleton, 24. Aviles tried to duck down on the seat, but the man next to her, she said, got down first.

"I ducked down in the fetal position because he was coming down the aisle," Aviles said. "I just stayed down in a fetal position praying to God that he thought I was dead. I just played dead.

"But then I felt him standing behind me. Like a real thick, heavy feeling behind me. Then he shot me. " The bullet entered her back, burning, and in moments she fainted.

As Ferguson advanced, emptying his first 16 bullets, some passengers sat frozen. Some, including Davellar, squirmed under seats. Some, like McHugh, simply crouched down. "I thought, `This is how it ends. I can't believe it,' " McHugh said.

When Ferguson stopped at the first set of doors, pausing to put another 15-round clip into his pistol, some passengers rushed forward in the car, trying to escape through the door into the second car.

In the panicky crush, some fell in the doorway to the second car.

Passengers were trapped in the aisle, with Ferguson - now having reloaded - advancing at their backs.

McHugh was among those trying to push forward.

"The shooting is getting closer," McHugh said. "I'm thinking `I'm not going to get through this way. ' All I can do is get out of his way. So I dove to my right, into the seats that face each other. There were people in the space already. One woman must have fallen backwards into the space because I'm face to face with her. She's screaming, `Lord, please save me. Lord, please save me. ' "

Pagett dove into a pile of passengers in the two facing seats near the front set of doors. Men and women were pressing their faces to the floor, he said, squirming to get as low as possible. One man already had blood splattered on the side of his face.

"It was almost like an ostrich trying to put its head in the ground. Out of sight, out of mind," Pagett said. But they could not escape the acrid smell of gunpowder or the soft cries of "Oh, God, help us," which now filled the car.

Caught in the aisle along with the others trying to push into the second car, Giugliano was pressed against Fagan. "I knew the guy with the gun was right behind us. He was very close. "

A shot tore into Giugliano's right arm and knocked him into a seat. "It felt like I was being tackled. " The bullet lodged in his chest. "Bob was saying, `It burns, burns,' " Fagan said of his friend.

As Ferguson advanced two-thirds of the way through the car and continued firing, Mi Kyung Kim fell to the floor with a fatal wound. So did Marita Magtoto. People scrambled, one by one, through the door into the second car.

Then the shooting stopped again. Ferguson had exhausted his second clip. While trying to load a third, he turned and headed back to the rear of the car - perhaps, police speculate, to get additional clips from his duffel bag, which he left at his seat.

In the silence, three men who had been caught in the crush at the front of the car turned around - Kevin Blum, 42, a father of four and bond trader for Lehman Brothers; Michael O'Connor Jr., 31, a securities trader for Goldman Sachs; and Mark McEntee, 34, a money market salesman for Merrill Lynch.

"All of a sudden, I get a bunch of positive vibes," Blum said. "I almost hear something say `It's going to be all right. ' "

He saw Ferguson drop his hand so that the gun was angled toward the floor.

"There was something about that point in time. I thought it was the right time to make a move. "

If Ferguson could reload, he'd be coming back. This might be their last chance. Everyone's last chance.

Blum ran down the aisle, briefcase still in his hand. He thought that he might throw it at Ferguson. "I couldn't tell you where O'Connor was. I can't tell you where Mark was. My sole concentration was on this guy. "

O'Connor remembers Blum saying, "Let's get him. "

"I don't honestly remember that," Blum said. "But the thought went through my mind and I might have said that. "

Blum ran toward Ferguson. "To my surprise, he dropped the gun. Dropped it. Before I tackled him. " The six-foot, 200-pound Blum knocked Ferguson into a row of seats midway in the car.

McEntee, who is 5-foot-9 and weighs about 165 pounds, piled on. He grabbed Ferguson's right arm and held it away from the floor to prevent him from grabbing the pistol. "I didn't know if he could reach it or not," McEntee said.

O'Connor helped to keep Ferguson pinned on his back. Ferguson,
mumbling incoherently, didn't resist.

Less than three minutes had passed since Ferguson opened fire. Five people lay dead or dying. Twenty were wounded. In the back of the car, Aviles regained consciousness on the floor. She saw Kevin McCarthy listing in his seat, his head covered with blood.

"I looked around, and I saw blood and nobody moving," she said.

As the three passengers held Ferguson down, the train pulled into Merillon Avenue. A passenger, Thomas Bourgeois, 41, had already run from the third car to the first and told the engineer someone was shooting.

But the engineer was unaware there'd been a massacre in car three, railroad officials said. He decided to stop the train short on the platform so that passengers in the first two cars could get out.

Normally at Merillon Avenue, those first two cars extend past the platform, with their doors closed, while people exit through the other 10 cars.

Fearing that people in the back two cars would now step onto the third rail, the engineer told the conductor via the public address system not to open the doors automatically. Instead, the conductor would have to open each car's doors manually.

"If the rear two cars opened," said Ed Yule, chairman of the United Transportation Union, which represents crew members, "they [passengers] would have fallen off the goddamned train. "

As they waited, passengers yelled for the doors to open.

After agonizing minutes, the doors finally did. People rushed into the cold air and ran.

Behind them, Blum, McEntee and O'Connor still held Ferguson pinned.

* * *

The first officials to reach the train were officers of the Garden City police. Officer William Grimes found more than a dozen people lying on a small, grassy hill adjoining the platform, and scores of others staggering down the street.

"People started yelling at me, `Help me, help me! ' " Grimes said.
Officer John Hoffman moved among the wounded outside the station, shocked to see people with blood streaming down their faces. "The people inside are worse," someone told him.

They were. The police found bodies everywhere, and so much blood on the floor that later they had to throw away their boots. The wounded grabbed at the cops' ankles, pleading for help.

Hoffman found the McCarthys in their seat, Kevin's head still on his dead father's chest, and Dennis resting on the shoulder of Schultheis.

Schultheis was motionless, Hoffman said, "with his eyes wide open and in shock. " He sat there that way for a long time.

Kim and Magtoto both lay in pools of blood in the front of the car, according to Fagan, who walked back in after helping Giugliano down to the grassy hill. Kim, he said, lay on her back, her eyes open to the ceiling, still breathing.
"I saw her every day on that train," Fagan said. "I just couldn't believe she was dead. "

Kim survived for a day before becoming the fifth to die.

Grimes found the three men still pinning Ferguson down, and assisted an off-duty Long Island Rail Road police officer, Andrew Roderick, in handcuffing him.

"We took him out quickly to a police car," Grimes
said, "because it was very obvious a lot of people were very angry and upset with him. "

In fact, Carl Petersen said, he saw one passenger run back into the third car and say, "We ought to shoot him right here. "

When he looked down at Ferguson pinned in the chair, Petersen was surprised to find that he felt "no anger for him. I had no hatred for him. "

Those who were not wounded wandered off, some lining up at telephones at the 7-Eleven across the street. Pagett said he simply stood in the street for a long moment. "I couldn't talk. Even when people asked me, `Were you on that train,' I couldn't talk. "

Helped by Fagan to the grassy hill, Giugliano lay in the cold air, covered by the coats of two women and one man who tended to him while they waited for ambulances. The man held his hand, and one of the women began praying with him out loud.

"They were trying to keep me awake," Giugliano said. "I didn't know these people, and they had their coats soaked in my blood. "

A man with a cellular telephone dialed Giugliano's home for him. He thought he had reached Giugliano's wife, and said that Giugliano had been shot. But when the man handed Giugliano the phone, it was his 14-year-old daughter, Dawn, on the line.

"My daddy's been shot," she was crying. "My daddy's been shot."

*****

Inside the Car
The locations of many of Colin Ferguson's victims and his actions on the train.

The Dead
James Gorycki
Marita Magtoto
Dennis McCarthy
Richard Nettleton

Location unknown: Mik-Yung Kim

The Injured
John Apsel
Elizabeth Aviles
Frank Barker
Brendan Doyle
John Forni
Marlene Francois
Robert Guiliano
Mark Heaney
Kevin McCarthy
Thomas McDermott
Jeanne Norton
Joseph Panico
MaryAnn Phillips
Leonard Schultheis
Minoru Saito

Location unknown:
Helen Alexanderson
Alfred Casazza
Lisa Combatti
Amy Federicci
Jill Michel
Debra Weber

A Killer's Path
1. Ferguson's seat -- he leaves his bag of ammunition under it.
2. Ferguson gets up, shoots Forni, then Phillips.
3. He continues walking down the aisle, injuring at least six and
killing Gorycki, McCarthy and Nettleton.
4. By the time he gets to the first vestibule, he has discharged all of
his shots, so he pauses to reload.
5. Ferguson resumes walking down the aisle, shooting as he goes.
6. He gets to the second vestibule, where he runs out of shots again.
Ferguson begins walking back toward his seat.
7. Kevin Blum, Mark McEntee and Michael O'Connor Jr., who are sitting in
this area, go after Ferguson.
8. Ferguson is caught and wrestled into the seats.

SOURCE: Nassau County police.

This story was reported by Maureen Fan, William B. Falk,  Craig Gordon, Michele Salcedo, Kevin McCoy,  Rebecca Blumenstein, Susan Forrest, Yolanda Rodriguez, Andrew Smith, Sidney C. Schaer and Beth Whitehouse. It was written by Falk