TRANSKRIPTIO 🔗
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Speaker 1: Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
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Speaker 2: At first moment we hurt what happened on the television that there was a van full of Pasidic June's kids going over the Brooklyn.
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Speaker 3: Bridge and somebody started to shoot.
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Speaker 4: At them and did I think they were.
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Speaker 3: One or two builds And then they were bringing him out and it was like, oh my god.
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Speaker 2: And then we come to find out that he was doing a shaft of because he was in the van on the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Speaker 1: When you're driving south on the FDR Drive and get off the exit ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, you see the first of four blue signs overhead. Each says the same thing as if the city were really trying to drill name into each driver's head. Arie Halberstam Memorial Ramp. In about twenty seconds, ere up the ramp, past the four blue signs and onto the Brooklyn Bridge itself, which is the same amount of time it took for a man named Rashid Baz to fire into a white van carrying fifteen Lubovich Hassitic seminary students, killing one student, gravely wounding another, and injuring two others. A blue Chevrolet caprice veered away from the white van as it rolled to a stop, its back and side windows shattered. Traffic came to a stop, the van was roped off with crime tape, and nothing moved on the Brooklyn Bridge for hours that cold morning, except for detectives and crime technicians carefully scouring the bus, which was now sitting crosswise on the on ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a freezing morning in New York City, and a temperature had barely budged. Pedestrians on the wall walkway above could see the CoP's breath as they huddled and discussed the scene. At a car repair shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a livery driver named Rashid Baz accelerated into the garage and shouted at one of its workers. Fix this, he shouted, pointing at the shattered driver's side window, and then he pointed a gun at the employee's head, and fix it fast. It wasn't quite ten thirty am on March first, nineteen ninety four, but already coverage of the shooting was dominating the news. The city, already on edge after the first failed World Trade Center bombing the previous year, braced for more attacks. That day, but there were none. This is murder Holmes. I'm at Marinovich. So back when I started this podcast, in our first episode, we had talked to a man named Roy Condrey, if you remember, he ran the website Died in House dot Com. On a lark, I had asked him to run a report on my home, thinking based on what my neighbors had told me, I had nothing to worry about. Well, it turns out I.
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Speaker 5: Was wrong, So no one has actually died that they found a record.
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Speaker 6: No one's murdered.
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Speaker 1: That's JB one of my producers, sharing news about what the report said.
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Speaker 5: But they did find out that a man named Rashid Boss lived and was arrested at this address because he shot in nineteen ninety four March. First, he shot a van of Orthodox Jewish students Glimbridge, and he killed year old kid named Ari Halpersim.
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Speaker 6: Others.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I'm not. No, I actually remember the Broken Bridge shooting. That's unbelievable. This strange thing about this is that I remember the crime. I was in grad school in Boston, but I was transfixed by it. The incident has since faded from my mind, just as it did for many new Yorkers. Of the thousands of drivers who passed underneath the blue sign that commemorates the Ari Habberstam Memorial Ramp, almost none could tell you what it stands for or what happened nearly thirty years ago on that concrete curve of road leading to the world's most famous bridge. Rashid Baz, after threatening the car repairman, hunched over and walked down Van Runt Street, a nine millimeter glock still in his pocket. He was a heavy setman, barrel chested, with a beard and trim goateee dark hair, But on a frigid morning in Red Hook, passing other repair shops and metal welding factories, no one gave him a second look. Rashid Baz, a Lebanese immigrant, a recent convert to Islam, and a man who might have had an most one friend in the working class neighborhood of Sunset Park where he lived, must have felt like he was the only man coming home early from work that day. He unlocked the door to the row home I live in now, where he lived with his wife and two kids and sister in law, walked up the stairs and retreated to the small room that my daughters have always hated sleeping in. The room was littered with Baz's anti semitic literature, a heap of clothes that lay barely folded on the floor. It wasn't even noontime. What was Rashid Baz thinking as he looked out the very same bedroom window I'm staring out now. Did the anger which had been burning inside him for days finally subside? Did he replay those twenty seconds again and again, the way one rifle jammed, then another, until he finally had to reach for the clock. He must have been listening to the radio, the volume turned down low. This I know for sure. He wanted to know how many victims there were in the other two rooms of the main floor of this house. His wife and kids saw the closed door, and they didn't even think of bothering him. Recently, he'd been more distant than ever, prone to moods they couldn't seem to snap him out of. Rather than share tea with them, he holed up in the small room and read his antisemitic screens, prayed five times a day. Less than twelve hours later, at two thirty eight in the morning, there would be a heavy pounding on the door of my home. Police cars had blocked off both ends of forty fifth Street, and an emergency response team huddled outside my door. In the windows of the row homes across the street, curtains were parted. Neighbors woken up by the shouts and sirens, peered out. A cop with a megaphone pointed it at the second floor window of my home and told Rashid Baz
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that he was surrounded. A few minutes later, their arms hoocked under each arm of his leather jacket. He was taken into custody and led down the same three blue stone steps and walked down every day, squinting into the police car's spotlights, handcuffed, the skin under his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. I asked my neighbor, marousol or Us, whose voice you heard at the beginning of this episode, what she remembers about that night.
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Speaker 3: I think it was maybe around nine of they took them out.
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Speaker 2: I mean, it was.
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Speaker 3: Tops a lot of activity going on. We had the news reporter and WEC we were out out in the window and they were asking.
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Speaker 4: Us questions, you know, so we were like, you.
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Speaker 3: Know, we said, we ain't not much, you know, about what was going on because something we found out.
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Speaker 4: The next day.
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Speaker 3: But and then everything they kept hie to the stuff because Barbara was always across the street with us with our kids or our kids were over there and we were like family type.
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Speaker 1: You know. Manny is Marisol's son, and he joined our conversation too. Many told me he used to play with Rashid Bazza's kids at the home are now living.
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Speaker 7: I'm best friend live in the house, Marshall and like the best friend related to yeah, and like they lived in the house with them.
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Speaker 3: They took them on the dusty because the mother was you.
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Speaker 4: Know, she was under brogs.
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Speaker 1: Did you when you were in the house, you remember anything like the smell of cooking or what the house was like.
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Speaker 8: Or house it was just it was runned out, used to cook and whatever, and my mother used to cook the gray.
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Speaker 1: They all lay together.
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Speaker 8: Yeah, people though all kind of people. People were elevenieses, decent, no Puerto Rican.
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Speaker 4: He was the only looking.
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Speaker 1: I asked Manny and Marisol what happened after Rashid's arrest.
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Speaker 7: It was just like it was never spoken about ever since it happened, like never.
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Speaker 4: We never brought it up.
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Speaker 6: Or anything like that.
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Speaker 4: We just made it. Would go over there.
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Speaker 8: Oh yeah, I would go over there, Yeah yeah.
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Speaker 1: You know. At Saint Vincent's Hospital, just a few hours after Rashid fired automatic weapons at the bus, a sixteen year old boy named Ariy Habersdam was still in life support. He would die two days later from gunshot wounds to the head. There were occasional screams of disbelief from his mother, who was comforted by the many Libavitchers who had converged there. A boy named Natchum Sasankan was also in grave condition, but despite a gunshot wound to the back of his head that would cause lasting brain damage, he would live. We'll be back after a short break. We're back with murder homes the moments that to Rashid Ba left his Chevrolet Caprice at the repair shop. It turns out that the car repairment at Lyle's Repair Shop in RedHook was also listening to ten ten wins. As he grudgingly began to assess the damage to the driver's side window of the Chevrolet Caprice, he noticed a single bullet shell on the floor underneath the passenger seat. He noticed this just about the time the news anchor described a shooting spree on the bridge with a vague description of the vehicle involved. It wasn't hard for him to put two and two together. Rashid pumped full of adrenaline as he caught up to the white van on the on wrap had fired through his own window first. The repairman called the police. Detectives arrived soon after scouring the car and tracing the license plate. It's funny how nineteen ninety four starts to look so vintage when I look at the photographs online. The crime technician who dust the Chevrolet has a mullet. The car itself looks like a relic. Here in the small room my daughter's refused to sleep in, with its one window and rusty child window guards, Rashid pulled on his sweatshirt, a cheap brown leather jacket. In his last hours as a free man, he walked back down the block where everyone knew him and didn't know him now, to at a neighbor who lived a few romes away. Did Rashid return to the ki repair shop? Did he walk for blocks circling his own neighborhood, trying to slow down his churning thoughts. Did he want to talk to someone, explain to one human being why he did something so terrible. There was no one to talk to. His parents were living five six hundred and twenty one miles away in Lebanon at the Livery Cab depot. He rarely spoke to anyone, even at the bay Ridge Islamic Center, where he had been dutifully attending the fiery sermons of an imam calling for vengeance after a massacre in Hebron, he was not required to say a word. But before he had committed murder on the Brooklyn Bridge, he had been increasingly enraged by a deadly attack on Palestinian worshippers at a place called a Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in the West Bank. He listened with growing anger, and then he left, so flushed with rage he could barely speak. Here's forensic psychologist Douglas Anderson's court testimony in which he discusses the massacre and its effect on Rashid Boz.
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Speaker 9: What was your accounting, your own version of the emotions that the defendant felt at the time upon learning that, well.
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Speaker 4: He was furious, he was terribly upset.
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Speaker 9: In fact, a friend Mufaq describes it like sparks for flashing from his eyes.
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Speaker 7: That's what he said.
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Speaker 9: And this was a terrible rage that he was experiencing what this bearded Jewish doctor from Brooklyn had done to his fellow Muslims in the mosque in Hebron.
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Speaker 7: And his friend had never seen him before, Boz being that angry before, all right.
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Speaker 9: And what
did Mufaq tell you?
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Speaker 4: What they did?
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Speaker 9: Then they went to the mosque and at the they heard in a mom or religious leader, a Muslim religious leader speak, is that correct?
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Speaker 7: That is correct?
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Speaker 9: Now? Just before, the defendant had said, in response to hearing about Hebron, they did it. The bastards did it.
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Speaker 1: That is right.
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Speaker 9: And then he went to the mosque and according to Muffak, he heard the mom say that this takes the mask off all of the Jews. It shows him to be racist and fascist as bad as the Nazis. Palestinians are suffering from the occupation, and it's time to end it. Isn't that what Mofaq told you? The mom said while he and the defendant were in the audience in that mosque. Yes, now, doctor, didn't the defendant tell you that all Arabs and Muslims should feel the same. Yes, didn't he tell you that after hearing about what happened at Hebron, that the distinction between Israelis and all other Jews, including a American Jews, became blurred for him?
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Speaker 1: Yes, Ohay was a hothead, slightly suspicious of the world around him, which he saw as vengeful and always dangerous. Rashid Baz carried guns in the trunk of his Livery cab, and when he was on duty he always carried a gun under his seat. Was it because he was looking for trouble or was it because he wanted to protect himself? Like so much of what I would discover about Rashid, there's a doubleness. Two ways you can see him. We'll be back after a short break. We're back with murder homes. In nineteen ninety four, the most dangerous jobs you could have in New York City was Livery cab driver. They were shot in the back of the head at night and robbed. Their cars, left at deserted intersections where traffic lights still turned red to green, the windows shot out, their bodies slumped over. I grew up in wartime Beirut, always with an earshot of gunfire and explosions, and now driving the streets of New York City. He was always just an unlucky fair away from violence. The guns and their role in the shooting spree will be the defining fact that will send Rashid to prison for one hundred and forty one years. But rewind once more. In the five days leading up to the Arie Habberstam murder, this has been what's on Rashid's mind. It's a place called the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the legendary gateway for the Garden of Eden. It's a mosque that sits thirty miles west of Jerusalem in the West Bank, And like so much of this story, there's a dividing line, two ways of seeing things. Half of the building is a synagogue and half of it is a mosque. Jewish and Muslim worshippers often come to violent scuffles here and constantly need to be separated. The State of Israel forced to come up with new rules to prevent the never ending threat of violence between the two groups of worshippers. Who has to prey outside on certain days, who is allowed inside? Two gods, one windowless temple with six foot thick stone walls, endless rising tension, only silenced by periods of negotiated prayer. On February twenty fifth, nineteen ninety four, a thirty seven year old Brooklyn born man named Baroke Goldstein ritually bathed himself, changed into an Israeli military uniform, and caught a ride to the Cave of the Patriarchs, where eight hundred Muslim Palestinian worshippers were praying. Carefully adjusting a pair of firing arranged ear protectors over his ears, he quietly stepped out of the searing mid day heat and into the cool shadows of the cave, where he opened fire with an eye M I Galile assault rifle, killing twenty nine worshippers, including six children, before he was subdued by the crowd and beaten to death. Days of riots followed more deaths later. Goldstein's gravesite became an ornate shrine to fire right hastic sympathizers, ten thousand of them paying their respects to a man who gunned down innocent men, women, and children, until Israeli authorities were forced to bulldoze it down, only leaving Goldstein's tomb itself on which these words are carved through this day. His hands are clean, his heart is pure. Here's even a song in his honor that Jewish settlers sing in the faces of Palestinians at a mass protest years later, Doctor Goldstein, There's none other like you in the world, Doctor Goldstein, We all love you. He aimed at terrorist's head, squeezing the trigger hard, and shot bullets, and shot and shot. In a recent twenty twenty three poll, ten percent of Israelis believe he's a hero. Doctor Goldstein, as his patients called him, was supposedly so mild mannered that he would leave operating rooms to cry, so dedicated that he would perform open heart surgery on the side of the road, But at the same time he hated Arabs so much he refused to treat them. Goldstein had left a thriving practice in Brooklyn to return to Israel, where he would commit a terrorist act in the West Bank. Rashid Baz would make the reverse journey from Beirut to Brooklyn, just as filled with rage in the end, and commit his terrorist act. But their lives intersect, they are inseparable. In the five days after doctor Goldstein, the mild mannered and soft spoken doctor murdered twenty nine worshippers. Rashid Baz read everything he could about the massacre at the Islamic Center in bay Ridge. The Imam compared it to a Nazi atrocity. After his arrest, Rashid Baz made a tape confession. He described himself as being upset by the incident at the Cave of the Patriarchs and says he supported acts of vengeance.
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Speaker 4: All right, Rashid, let's get started. You want to just tell us how upset were you?
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Speaker 9: I was upset, but not upset to go do something.
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Speaker 4: Were you upset to say something?
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Speaker 9: To say something?
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Speaker 4: I mean, did you make comments about it? You know, about what should be done about that?
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Speaker 9: Should it be done about that?
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Speaker 4:
Yeah? In other words, did you when you were talking with your friends, did you express your view of how you, as a Lebanese man from Beirut, should deal with the situation like what happened in Lebanon.
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Speaker 1: I told them it's not fair mm hm.
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Speaker 4: And they should take revenge, and they should what take revenge? That they should take revenge? Right? That who should take revenge?
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Speaker 9: The people over then.
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Speaker 1: She'd bas'es fortunes after getting caught only got worse. It was a sign and dreamely conservative judge named Harold Rothwax, who was so hardcore he once threw a court's scenographer in prison for not showing up to work. A lawyer named Eric Sears defended him, and with the help of a forensic psychiatrist named Douglas Anderson, whose testimony you heard earlier, they desperately tried to come up with an effective strategy. Rashid met with Adnerson three times at Riker's Island. It was the first time he tried to explain his reasons for what he did, but he grew frustrated as he spoke. He was never completely fluent in English, and there were so many contradictions he needed to clarify. He grew up Druze and converted to Islam. He carried guns in his cab for months, but had no intention of using them until the Cave of Patriarch's massacre. He wanted Anderson to understand how much bloodshed that he had already seen growing up in Beirut, that the violence he witnessed as a child had shaped him. He wanted this stranger who had to grasp his entire life in three sessions to try to understand how out of control he felt upon hearing of the Goldstein massacre, or at least that's the defense strategy his attorney decided on. Because what if a livery cab driver, a friendless loaner, a man who woke up every day feeling like a nobody that the world could shrug off, a man who once confessed to a neighbor on the street I live on that he didn't know who he really was. What if he finally thought he had a purpose, just as doctor Goldstein thought he had found his. Here's doctor Anderson again on the stand.
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Speaker 9: You mentioned earlier the incident in Hebron, the massacre in Hebron. Yes, do you know when that incident was in relation to the events on the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Speaker 7: That was Friday February twenty fifth.
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Speaker 4: That would be.
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Speaker 9: Some three or four days before the event on the Brooklyn Bridge, four days in your opinion, doctor, did the Hebron incident or mister Boz's reaction to the Hebron incident have any impact on his state of mind during that time?
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Speaker 7: Yes, it had an enormous impact in what way he was enraged. He was absolutely furious. He was I think hebron put him from conditioning yellow to condition red.
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Speaker 1: Rashid bos would tell Anderson that it was as angry as he had ever been in his life. But the PTSD defense failed. The prosecution was able to dredge up its own psychiatrist, who convinced the jury that a man carrying two semi automatic rifles and a handgun in his livery cab was a hair trigger tempered hothead just waiting to commit a hate crime. Add to that the fact that antisemitic pamphlets were found in his home on forty fifth Street, my home, my daughter's room, the one they insisted tacking up a hand painted sign over the door that said good vibes. On January eighteenth, nineteen ninety five, Rashid Baz received a term of one hundred and forty one years in prison with no chance of parole. Judge Harry Rothwack stated that Baz deserved quote the most severe punishment. I talked to clinical psychiatrists doctor Judith Joseph, who you heard from in one of our earlier episodes, and asked her about Rashid Baz and his PTSD defense. While she didn't treat Rashid Baz, she was able to offer insight based on her clinical experience. Doctor Judith began by telling me that people with PTSD feel as if they're not part of the community anymore.
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Speaker 6: With PTSD, so people often think that the world is bad, or I am bad, or no one will love me. They may feel as if they're not really a part of a community Moore, they may feel detached from situations. And then there's the arousal symptoms that you can have with PTSD. This is things like a pronounced startlar response, so someone walks to the door and they're not going to hurt you, but just that trigger makes your body jump into fight or flight, or they're hypervigilant. They think that just around every corner something bad is going to happen. And then there are other type of subtypes of PTC where people don't feel as if they're in the room that they're in there, they're not in that reality. They feel as that they're kind of floating above the room, or they feel like as if they're not a part of themselves. So at times they just freeze, they can't move, where they just seem like they're not even in their bodies.
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Speaker 1: But what about Rashid? Did she buy his defense?
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Speaker 6: You know, a very good mentor of mine at Columbia would say mental illness is no excuse for bad behavior, and in the condition of hate and racism, we're very careful to delineate that hatred and racism are not mental health issues. So someone who does have complex PTSD, who has been through horrific conditions, can become more triggered easily by prompts in the environment. However, it's a different case when you're planning out a hate crime, because that requires executive functioning, acquires time management, that requires gathering materials, that requires a plot, and so that's a very different mechanism than being triggered in a moment. You know, I haven't treated this person, but that's a far stretch.
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Speaker 1: Ten days after the Brooklyn Bridge shooting, Hamas Movement in Gaza released a communicate praising Rashid Baz's attack on the van just this is rarely extremists had deified Goldstein. Hamas embraced Baz as a hero as well, giving him the title of
Muhid, a holy warrior, and even Islam a son of Islam, meaning one who serves both as role model and inspiration to others. In the end, they had both become formally recognized heroes and terrorists. But infamy isn't always a level playing field. Rashid Baz died last year in prison. When I contacted his lawyer, this was the first he'd heard of his death. When I talked to his former forensic psychiatrist, he hadn't been aware of Rashid's death either. Nearly thirty years at the Rashid had managed to transfix an entire city, his passing hadn't been mentioned in a single news article. They both asked why I was interested in the case, and I stammered for a bit, and then I told him the truth. I found out he lived in my home. Hardly anyone wants to talk about Rashid Boaz. The forensic psychiatrist said he lost the files. The lawyer said that attorney client privilege survives the death of the client. The pizza place where Rashid used to meet his one friend Mufak for earnest discussions about Islam, no longer exists. The repair shop where Rashid left his blue Chevrolet Caprice is long gone. He's dead. But for a case that touches on a conflict that still makes headlines, it's odd that he's on the verge of disappearing. Even Marisol and Manny are at a loss for words when I ask what he was like. Even in his own home, he was a kind of phantom.
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Speaker 2: Like I said, we didn't verly talk at all.
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Speaker 3: I've never heard him salts or anything. Most of the time I would used to be in the gate, and he used to be with the kids in the front, and then he would go all to stay, like coming out of work and sit down, be with the kids who want and then yeah.
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Speaker 2: But although it is be no.
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Speaker 1: I'm not sure I believe in ghosts. I think that's a weakness of mine, because as host of a podcast titled Murder Homes, I think that's a deficiency and I'm going to have to work on that because I want to believe in them. I want to believe in Rashid's ghost because first of all, no one wants to talk about him, so maybe finally he will. Maybe I finally hear his voice in some strange way, the ghost of Arry Harbersdam. I want to feel it the next time I drive up that on ramp before you get to that postcard view of the East River where you look right actually at sunset, the ghost of the twenty nine worshiper is burw Goldstein murdered. They must be somewhere, and doctor Goldstein too. One of the types of crimes that bothered me the most is random violence. Strangers who say one wrong word, vump a shoulder, stare too long, with one ending up dead. There's a lot of that in Brooklyn, where both Rashid and Goldstein made their home. In fact, lived just miles away from each other for years. I wonder the closest they might have come geographically, And because the worst crimes demand some sort of useless reconciliation fantasy, in my mind, I even imagine those two ghosts, Rashid driving Goldstein somewhere forever in his blue Chevrolet Caprice, forced to finally figure out where their real home is, and if it's a place not here on earth that they can finally occupy together. There's one more thing. Just when I thought the darkest story of my home had been exercise, Manny leaned forward and told me there was something else. He asked me if I wanted to hear about the ghost child he saw twice when he and his friend were playing in my home. This is Murder Holmes. I'm Matt Merinovitch. Murder Holmes is created by an executive producer by Matt Merinovitch. Executive producers are Jennifer Bassett and Taylor Chakoine. Story editor is Jennifer Bassett. Supervising producer is Carl Ktel. Producer is Evan Tyre. Sound designed by Taylor Chicoine, Evan Tyre and Carl Katle. Special thanks to Ali Perry and Nikiatour. Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.