Subway killing shocks New York City
A man is facing murder charges after a woman was fatally set on fire on a subway train in New York City, in an attack police described as one of the most depraved crimes they could imagine. The killing took place on the F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn on Sunday morning, when the victim was apparently asleep on a stationary train car.
According to the New York Police Department, the man calmly approached the woman at about 7:30am and used a lighter to ignite her clothing. Emergency responders pronounced her dead at the scene. Police said there had been no interaction between the two and that they did not believe the pair knew one another.
A suspect identified as Sebastian Zapeta was taken into custody hours later. Transit police arrested him after three high school students reported recognising him from images widely circulated by police on the basis of surveillance footage and body-camera video. Officers on patrol in the station rushed to the fire and used extinguishers to put it out.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch praised the students and the officers, saying New Yorkers had once again helped bring a suspect in quickly. She also used unusually harsh language in describing the crime. The woman has not been identified. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Zapeta is a 33-year-old Guatemalan citizen who entered the country illegally after being previously removed in 2018.
The case is likely to be politically explosive as well as horrific. Al Jazeera noted that some right-wing politicians have used crimes committed by undocumented immigrants to press for tougher deportation policies, even though immigrants overall commit violent crime at lower rates than US-born people. The backdrop is a city where roughly four million subway rides are taken each weekday and violent crime is relatively rare.
Police data showed nine subway homicides in 2024 through November, compared with five in the same period in 2023. The attack also came shortly after a different, highly watched subway case in New York: a jury earlier this month acquitted Daniel Penny of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely. In that case, Neely died after being restrained in a chokehold on a train.
What makes Sunday’s killing especially disturbing is how little warning appears to have preceded it. The woman was motionless. The suspect is said to have acted without provocation. And the violence unfolded in one of the city’s most familiar spaces, on a routine morning ride. That combination has left police, transit riders and city officials confronting not just a homicide investigation, but another episode that will shape the public conversation about safety on New York’s subway system.
