If Robert Giugliano could go back to the courtroom where he stared down Colin Ferguson, the man who shot him in the chest during the infamous Long Island Rail Road shooting of 1993, he’d do one thing differently.
“I would have taken the shot and jumped on him and hit him,” said Giugliano, who created a minor spectacle during the case by yelling at Ferguson, who was representing himself in the trial. “I was angered. I just couldn’t just walk out of that courtroom.”
Giugliano’s outburst, the rest of the intensely emotional and chilling trial, along with the details of the shooting itself are returning to televisions this week for the Investigation Discovery documentary, “Terror on a Train,” premiering Wednesday at 10 p.m. It’s the 20th anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1993 horror that killed six and injured 19 others in one of America’s first mass shootings.
The anniversary was one reason the filmmakers and victims were inspired to do the documentary; the ongoing gun violence and increasing number of mass shootings was the other.
“It’s a memorial for my husband who should not have died this way, and I know what it’s like to go through this,” says Joyce Gorycki, whose husband James was shot to death on the train. “ I’ll do everything I can do to change the [gun] laws. I’ll do it until the day I die.”
The incident was a huge story at the time, thanks to the severity of the quick massacre and the courtroom circus that followed. Ferguson opened fire on a rush hour train as it pulled into Merillon Avenue station, creating two minutes of chaos and bloodshed.
Later at the trial, he fired his own defense team and insisted on representing himself, creating a haunting and emotional scene as he cross-examined his own victims.
“He wanted the world to hear his voice,” says Charlie Minn, the director of the film who was living on Long Island at the time of the shooting and was friends with Mi Kyung Kim, one of the people killed. “He knew he was going to jail and this was his way of getting his last licks in before he went.”
Minn reached out to Ferguson through letters to see if he would appear in the documentary, but Ferguson — who is serving 315 years for second degree murder — never responded. That’s OK for Minn, because he wanted to focus on the victims’ stories, not the madman behind them.
“If we stop giving these mass murders their 15 minutes of fame i think we’d see less of these shootings,” he says. The film “gives the victims a voice. At the end of the day, we always know the killer’s name; we don’t know the victims name.”
Gorycki got heavily involved in gun control groups after the shooting as chair of the Long Island chapter of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. She’s also helped the victims keep in touch with each other: they exchange Christmas card and get together for memorials.
For the 20th anniversary, they’re gathering for dinner at Eleanor Rigby’s, a restaurant two blocks away from the Merillon Avenue station.
Giugliano has physically recovered from the shooting, but he’s still emotionally affected. Recently, his granddaughter was born on Dec. 7, giving him something else to think about on that day. But every time another mass shooting hits the news, he feels new pain.
“I don’t turn the TV off. I look at it, I watch it,” he says. “I got to live with it every day.”