An Inclusive Litany

12/5/94

Lebanese-born Rashid Baz went on trial in late October 1994, accused of shooting at a van full of Hasidic Jewish students after they cut him off on New York's Brooklyn Bridge. One student was killed in the March attack; three were wounded. His lawyer argued that Baz was suffering from ethnic rage.

Defense attorney Eric Sears argued that his client grew up in Beirut amid civil war, violence and an atmosphere of hatred, all of which rendered him temporarily insane. In Baz's case, argued Sears, the violence in Beirut, "besides being constant and random, was often brutal. The house you left in the morning could be rubble that night," he declared in his opening statement at the trial. "Those years inevitably left scars on his personality."