1980s crimes in New York City

Yusef Hawkins (also spelled as Yusuf Hawkins, March 19, 1973 – August 23, 1989) was a 16-year-old African-American who was shot to death on August 23, 1989 in Bensonhurst, a predominantly Italian-American working-class neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Hawkins and three friends were attacked by a crowd of 10 to 30 white youths, with at least seven of them wielding baseball bats. One, armed with a handgun, shot Hawkins twice in the chest, killing him.

Carlina Renae White (born July 15, 1987), also known as Nejdra "Netty" Nance, is an American woman who solved her own kidnapping case and was reunited with her biological parents 23 years after being abducted as an infant from the Harlem Hospital Center in New York City. The case represents one of the longest known gaps in an abduction in which the victim was reunited with the family in the United States. For years she lived with Annugetta Pettway, a woman she believed was her mother. However, she later discovered that Pettway was actually her kidnapper. White was portrayed by Keke Palmer in the Lifetime film Abducted: The Carlina White Story. Upon discovering her kidnapping and her biological parents, she kept her legal name as Carlina White.

On December 22, 1984, four teens, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, Darrell Cabey, and James Ramseur, were shot and wounded by Bernhard Goetz on a New York City Subway train in Manhattan.

On the evening of 8 December 1980, the English musician John Lennon, formerly of the Beatles, was shot and fatally wounded in the archway of the Dakota, his residence in New York City. The killer, Mark David Chapman, was an American Beatles fan who was envious and enraged by Lennon's lifestyle, alongside his 1966 comment that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus". Chapman said he was inspired by the fictional character Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, a "phony-killer" who loathes hypocrisy.

The Ramrod was a gay leather bar at 394–395 West Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, which earned unsought notoriety as the site of an infamous hate crime. The bar was shuttered and never reopened after an act of anti-gay gun violence in 1980. Ex-transit cop Ronald K. Crumpley fired a submachine gun at Ramrod bar patrons, killing two people and wounding three others during a shooting spree in Greenwich Village, then considered one of the epicenters of gay life in the United States.

Ronald K. Crumpley (January 26, 1942 – April 4, 2015) was a former officer with the NYC Transit Authority who went on a shooting spree in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood in November 1980, targeting gay men.

The Palm Sunday massacre was a mass shooting in Brooklyn, New York, that resulted in the deaths of ten people: two women, two teenage girls, and six children. There was one survivor, an infant girl.

The Central Park jogger case (sometimes termed the Central Park Five case) was a criminal case concerning the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a woman who was running in Central Park in Manhattan, New York, on April 19, 1989. Crime in New York City was peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged. On the night Meili was attacked, dozens of teenagers had entered the park, and there were reports of muggings and physical assaults.

The Central Park jogger case (sometimes termed the Central Park Five case) was a criminal case concerning the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a woman who was running in Central Park in Manhattan, New York, on April 19, 1989. Crime in New York City was peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged. On the night Meili was attacked, dozens of teenagers had entered the park, and there were reports of muggings and physical assaults.