On this day in New York · July 29, 1976
The Son of Sam Killings Begin in the Bronx
A gunman walked up to a parked car in Pelham Bay and opened fire, starting a year of shootings that would grip New York with fear.
The facts
- Date
- July 29, 1976
- Location
- Pelham Bay, the Bronx
- Victims
- Donna Lauria, 18, killed; her friend Jody Valenti wounded
- Toll
- Six killed and others wounded before Berkowitz was caught in August 1977
Just after one in the morning on July 29, 1976, a man walked up to a car parked in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx and fired a .44-caliber revolver at two young women sitting inside. Donna Lauria, an eighteen-year-old medical technician, was killed, and her friend Jody Valenti was wounded. It was the first in a string of attacks by David Berkowitz, who called himself the Son of Sam and taunted the police and the press with letters. Over the next year he shot at least thirteen people, killing six, most of them young people in parked cars across the outer boroughs, and pushed the city into a summer of dread.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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The first shooting attributed to Berkowitz occurred in the Pelham Bay neighborhood of the Bronx
Son of Sam, Wikipedia
Source: Son of Sam, Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The manhunt was one of the largest in city history, and the fear reshaped a stretch of the 1970s already strained by blackout and near-bankruptcy. Berkowitz was arrested in Yonkers in August 1977, and a New York law passed in his wake tried to stop criminals from cashing in on their own notoriety.
Sources
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