Brooklyn Bridge Shooting

A 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting case, in which Rashid Baz, a Lebanese national, was convicted of shooting at a van of Jewish students, was reopened by the FBI in 1999 and reclassified as an act of terrorism.

Just before 10:30 am on March 1, 1994, Baz, then a 28-year-old livery car driver, attacked a van on the Brooklyn Bridge that was carrying 15 Hasidic boys from Manhattan to Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Baz sprayed both sides of the van with bullets from two guns before fleeing into Brooklyn. Two of the students who were hit suffered head wounds: 16-year-old Aaron Halberstam suffered severe brain damage and died several days later, while Nachum Sosonkin, 18, underwent surgery and survived, though a bullet remained lodged in his brain. Two other students sustained minor gunshot wounds. Police arrested Baz at his uncle's home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the next day.

The shooting occurred less than a week after Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Jewish settler, massacred 29 Muslims worshipping at a mosque in Hebron. The press quickly labeled Baz a “fundamentalist terrorist” who was retaliating for the attack in Hebron, and police began investigating possible links between Baz and the terrorist organization Hezbollah. After the shooting, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani placed the New York City's law-enforcement agencies on an anti-terrorist alert, although no credible threats had been issued. Concurrently, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case was being tried in New York City. This confluence of events put a strain on New York's Arab and Jewish communities.

Baz went on trial on November 1, 1994, with angry spectators and tight security. The prosecution deemed the attack a “blind-side ambush” in which Baz, without provocation, attempted to kill all 15 boys in the van. The defense claimed that Baz's childhood in war-torn Beirut caused him to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, and that his state of mind during the attack was therefore questionable. Pretrial hearings admitted a tape of Baz's interrogation by police, in which he admitted to being “afraid,” stating that the van of students had cut him off and brandished a gun at him—none of which explained why he had several illegal firearms in his car or why he had pursued the van so aggressively. (Baz did not testify on his own behalf at the trial.) On December 1, 1994, Baz was convicted on one count of second-degree murder, 14 counts of attempted murder, and one count of criminal use of a firearm; he was later sentenced to 114 years in prison. The crime was classified as a case of “road rage.”

After much pressure from the Halberstam family and several political officials, including Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, Mayor Giuliani, and First Lady Hillary Clinton, the FBI reopened the investigation in August 1999. By that December, the FBI had determined that Baz had acted alone and was not linked to any terrorist organizations. The FBI did, however, reclassify the crime as a terrorist attack, motivated by political views and a wish to retaliate against Jewish people.