Five Friends in a Car

By MARGARET CARLSON

Like many teenagers on a Friday night, James Cooney needed a car to pick up his girlfriend. He borrowed his good friend Barry Bootan's father's Chevrolet, banged it into a pole and racked up $900 worth of body damage. To come up with the money, the two New York City prep school graduates hatched a bizarre robbery scheme. Over the next 48 hours, youngsters who had never been in trouble played out every parent's nightmare. A minor scrape gave way to panic, then to terror. All judgment vanished. At the end, Cooney, 18, was dead, and four other lives lay in ruins.

Frantic to get the car repaired before Bootan's father returned from a weekend fishing trip, Cooney and Bootan, 18, called three other classmates from Fordham Prep, a Jesuit school from which they were graduated on June 3. About 1 a.m. last Sunday, the five headed off in Jason Katanic's mother's Chrysler with three ski masks and a .22-cal. rifle. They drove to a late-night grocery, where Cooney held up the owner for $140. Buoyed by their success, the boys rode around looking for someone else to rob, shooting out the windows of about six empty cars before pulling alongside an auto parked on a deserted street with a couple inside.

Cooney leaned out the window of the Chrysler, pointed the rifle in the driver's face and demanded his wallet. He then fired two shots into the side of the car, and the boys' luck ran out. The driver turned out to be an off- duty policeman. Ducking down, the officer drew his .38 pistol, stuck it out the window and fired five times. At least one shot hit Cooney square in the face. Four more bullets strafed the Chrysler as it sped away, Cooney dying in the front seat.

Still thinking a cover-up possible, the panicked boys dumped Cooney's body in thick weeds and pledged one another to secrecy. They burned one boy's bloodstained clothing and somehow managed to get a replacement for the bullet- pocked rear window of the Chrysler. For almost three days, the boys acted as if nothing had happened, silent even in the face of Cooney's disappearance. Then Bootan told his girlfriend, who notified police. Bootan and Katanic were arrested on charges of armed robbery, attempted robbery and attempted murder. Brendan Moynihan, 16, and Danny Florio, 17, who reportedly cowered on the floor of the back seat, jackets over their heads during the robberies, have not yet been charged.

Horrible deeds done by good people prompt the most difficult questions. How did efforts to get the car fixed spiral into robbery and death, bad decisions made at every turn? Nothing about Cooney or his friends suggested they were capable of reckless, murderous behavior. So far, drinking and drugs do not appear to be a factor. Three of the boys came from working-class families who struggled to pay the $3,225 tuition at a strict private school where Catholic, not prep, is the defining sensibility. Cooney was the stepson of a police officer; Katanic's widowed mother is a clerical worker. All five boys were headed to college in the fall.

Fordham Headmaster Cornelius McCarthy is baffled as to how good kids could go so far wrong so fast. "James Patrick Cooney was a happy-go-lucky kid, confident of himself." Confident, perhaps cocksure. Away from the protection of adults, Cooney and his friends indulged the illusion they were exempt from death and other mortal coils, as the young tend to do, this time to a deadly end.

With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/New York