NEW YORK (AP) – It was a subterranean explosion, a cataclysmic meeting of all the wrong elements: A gun-toting white man and four panhandling black youths, all inside a subway car in an era where crime beneath the city streets far outpaced justice above.

On Dec. 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz rose from his seat on the No. 2 train in Manhattan, shot the teens and ignited a national furor over hot-button issues from racism to gun control.

“You don’t look so bad,” the shooter told one wounded youth, who wound up paralyzed. “Here’s another.”

Twenty years later, with subway crime at historic lows and New York once again a hit with tourists, the tale of the subway gunman exists mostly as an artifact of a far different city in a far different time.

“Could it happen now?” asked attorney Ron Kuby, who won a $43 million civil suit against Goetz on behalf of victim Darrell Cabey. “Inconceivable. Inconceivable that the attack would take place. Inconceivable that the attacker would be hailed as a hero.”

Former NYPD chief of detectives Richard Nicastro echoed Kuby’s feelings.

“It’s hard to imagine it happening again,” said Nicastro, who retired in 1986. “What it showed was the fear most people had in traveling about.”

Goetz turned himself in to police in Concord, N.H., on New Year’s Eve.

At the time, there were an average of 15,000 felonies a year in the subway – more than 40 every day around the nation’s largest mass transit system. Twenty years later, those figures are the ghosts of subways past. Through Nov. 14 this year, there were just 2,760 felonies reported – barely eight per day. Murders in the subways, which topped out at 26 in 1990, are at zero for the year.

The subway gets about 4.5 million riders daily; back then, the number of straphangers was in freefall, with one out of every four passengers abandoning the subways between 1965 and 1982. In 1984, ridership was at about 2.7 million per day.

By then, the subways were decorated in spray-painted graffiti tags and inhabited by muggers, junkies, panhandlers, the homeless. The cost of admission was a mere 90 cents for a ride scarier than anything at Six Flags.

Track fires and train breakdowns became standard fare. But it was out-of-control crime in filthy trains and frightening stations that inflicted the heaviest wounds to the city psyche.

“The subways are everybody’s second neighborhood,” said Thomas Reppetto, a police historian who heads the Citizens Crime Commission. “If you live in Brooklyn, and see a story about a robbery in the Bronx, you think, “Gee, that’s terrible.’

“But if there’s a story about a robbery in the subway, you think, “Whoa. I ride down there.”‘

One of those riders was Goetz, who brought a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38-caliber handgun with him when he boarded a downtown train shortly after 5 p.m. on a Saturday. The four youths had boarded the train in the Bronx, carrying sharpened screwdrivers.

“Give me five dollars,” said Troy Canty, one of the four, as he approached the thin, bespectacled passenger. Goetz pulled his illegal weapon just north of the World Trade Center and began shooting; the muzzle fire provided a flash point for advocates on either side of any number of issues: Gun control. Crime. Race. Vigilantism.

President Reagan fielded Goetz questions at a White House news conference, in between queries about Social Security and defense spending.

Goetz later said he never set foot on the subway again after that day.

He was cleared of attempted murder charges in 1987 and spent 250 days in jail the same year for a weapons conviction in the case.

In 1996, a Bronx jury awarded Cabey $43 million in his civil suit against Goetz.

The Cabey family never received one cent from Goetz, and Darrell Cabey remains trapped in a wheelchair – “in a perpetual state of being an 8-year-old,” Kuby said.