A sleeping woman was set on fire on a New York subway by a man who appeared to sit and watch as she burned to death.
The victim was believed to be sleeping on a stationary train at Brooklyn’s Coney Island-Stilwell subway station Sunday morning when the suspect calmly approached her and set her clothes on fire, police said.
Afterwards, the man got out of the car and sat on a bench on the platform, watching the police patrolling the station rushing to put out the fire.
The woman, who has not yet been identified, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The suspect, a 33-year-old man from Guatemala who has not been named, was arrested late Sunday.
The attack occurred on an F train in Brooklyn – Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty
The New York Police Department (NYPD) said the man and the woman had no previous interaction and they were not believed to know each other.
New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a press conference that as the train pulled into the station at 7.30am local time, the attacker used what appeared to be a lighter to set fire to the victim’s clothes, “and within seconds he was dead.” Completely engulfed.”
Video posted on social media showed a man sitting motionless on a platform bench in front of the burning woman.
Ms Tisch added on Sunday night: “Unbeknownst to the responding officers, the suspect had remained at the scene and was sitting on a bench on the platform outside the train carriage.”
In one video, a police officer appears to be talking to the suspect, pointing his radio toward the platform and saying: “Can you help me? Come down. I need to clear this space.”
The man, wearing a gray hoodie, stood up and left the scene.
Ms Tisch said CCTV and police body cameras on the Tube had given “a very clear and detailed view of the killer”, calling the killing “one of the most depraved crimes a person can commit against another person” .
Joseph Gulotta, chief of the New York Police Department’s Traffic Bureau, said the suspect immigrated to the United States from Guatemala in 2018. Sources told the New York Post that he had been living in a homeless shelter.
Coney Island Station later in the day – Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty
Also on Sunday, a stabbing on a subway near Queens left one person dead and another injured.
Nine people had died on the subway in 2024 as of November, compared with five deaths in the same period in 2023, police data shows.
Earlier this month, Daniel Penny was found not guilty of homicide after choking an unarmed homeless man, Jordan Neely, on the city’s subway last year.
Neely, 30, a former Michael Jackson impersonator with a history of mental illness, kept shouting at passengers when Penny, 26, grabbed him from behind and choked him for more than five minutes .
The case set off weeks of protests and heated debate over race, public safety on transportation and how the city handles mental health and homelessness.
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