A Mass Murderer's Journey Toward Madness

By Anastasia Toufexis

Speaking with a Jamaican accent, Colin Ferguson said he was from Louisiana and needed a room. The India-born general manager of the Royal Motel in Long Beach, California, looked at his would-be guest, a bulky black man who admitted to being unemployed, and said, "O.K., but if you're not good I won't let you stay here." "But," Nick Bhakta recalls, "he was good. Every day he did not stay in the room. He came only in the nighttime." Bhakta charged $35 a night; Ferguson stayed three weeks. In retrospect, all he really needed was 15 days -- the time it took to clear his application to buy the 9-mm Ruger semiautomatic handgun he used last week on a rush-hour commuter train in New York.

Last spring, when Colin Ferguson traveled from Brooklyn to California and back, he had already meandered through misfortune and failure and was perhaps on the brink of madness. Family, school, work, health, everything seemed to have withered away. "He had the 'American Dream,' and when it fell apart, he looked to blame somebody," his landlord told the New York Daily News. In the end, all Ferguson had left was rage.

He was born with many advantages. In his native Jamaica, Ferguson attended the exclusive Calabar boys' high school, an academy that numbers among its alumni Percival Patterson, the island's Prime Minister. The Fergusons lived in a two-story home protected by walls and wrought-iron gates in Kingston's elite suburb of Havendale. His father Von Herman Ferguson was one of the most prominent businessmen in Jamaica. When the elder Ferguson died in a car accident in 1978, his funeral was attended by government and military luminaries. However, that passage -- and the subsequent death of Ferguson's mother from cancer -- shattered the family's fortunes. In 1982 Ferguson, then 24, left for the U.S. He was never able to re-create the life he had led on the island.

At first, though, there had been hope. He met Audrey Warren, an American of Jamaican descent, married her in 1986, and qualified for permanent U.S. residency. The couple moved into a house on Long Island and had a son. Enrolled in a local community college, Ferguson made the dean's list three times. But that approximation of bliss collapsed in 1988, when Warren sued for divorce and won custody of their child. By last week, Ferguson was jobless and living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, in a tiny $175-a-month room with a communal bath down the hall.

His descent was precipitous. At the time of his divorce, Ferguson began working for Ademco, a burglar-alarm manufacturer. A year into his job, however, he fell from a stool, receiving a back injury that led to his termination. He sued for compensation, won a $26,250 judgment but, for some reason, tried to reopen proceedings with the New York State workers' compensation board. He complained that he was a victim of racial prejudice and rejected state-appointed doctors sent to examine him because their surnames sounded ethnic and not black. Eventually, Ferguson, who wrote and called incessantly, was put on a list of possible troublemakers security guards at the board were to watch out for.

In the fall of 1990 Ferguson enrolled at Adelphi University and got into angry confrontations with teachers and students, accusing white students of racism and black activists of being "Uncle Toms." "Black rage will get you," he told a black professor. He talked loudly of violent race wars and revolution. He interrupted a lecture by yelling "Kill everybody white!" By 1991, he was suspended. In 1992 his ex-wife, who has not spoken to him since their divorce, filed a complaint with police charging that Ferguson had pried open the trunk of her car. Ferguson also clashed with police when he got into a shoving match with a woman over a subway seat. He had compiled a list of complaints and enemies, as did other recent mass murderers -- including Alan ( Winterbourne, who shot four people in Oxnard, California, two weeks ago, and Gian Luigi Ferri, who killed eight people in a San Francisco office building last July. But while officials on the compensation board and at Adelphi were on Ferguson's list, to him almost everyone -- white, Asian or black -- had become a racist and particularly prejudiced against him. (Ferguson had "friends" too. Out of regard for outgoing Mayor David Dinkins, who is black, and police commissioner Raymond Kelly, who is white, he did not open fire until he was beyond New York City limits.)

Early this year Ferguson went to California in search of new opportunities. There were only new humiliations. "He did not like competing with immigrants and Hispanics for jobs," James Clement, a friend, told the Washington Post. When Ferguson applied at a car wash, said Clement, the manager laughed at him. The next day, Ferguson walked into Turner's Outdoorsman and made a downpayment on a gun. As proof of residency, he used a California driver's license he had received on a previous visit and the Royal Motel address. Fifteen days later his security check was completed, and Ferguson paid the balance. By the end of May, he was back in New York City -- with the Ruger. Ferguson thought that the compensation board was going to reopen his case on Dec. 3. On the following Tuesday, when he learned that the news was false, he boarded the 5:33 train to Hicksville.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles