Update:
Authorities have arrested Sebastian Zapeta for allegedly lighting a sleeping woman on fire aboard a Coney Island F train. The New York Post describes Zapeta as a “Guatemalan migrant.”: “The suspect entered the country and was detained by border patrol agents in Arizona in June 2018 — and so far authorities have not found a past criminal record for him in New York City, law enforcement sources said,” they write.
Original:
A woman died in Brooklyn this weekend after a man set her aflame on an F train at Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island. The woman was reportedly alseep on the train when a man set her on fire with a lit match, police told The New York Post. Officers were able to put out the flames but it was too late to save her life. Her assailant fled the scene.
New York Police Department officers arrived at the crime scene near the Coney Island-Stillwell Ave. subway station just before 7:30 a.m. They discovered a woman on fire in a stopped F train.
The woman was surrounded with liquor bottles, which may account for the speed and intensity of the fire, although police have not officially linked the liquid to the fire.
NYPD has arrested Sebastian Zapeta, a Guatemalan migrant, accused of setting a sleeping woman on fire on a New York subway and watching her burn to death. pic.twitter.com/Hv70Jl51W7
— Tiffany Fong (@TiffanyFong_) December 23, 2024
“In the F Train at Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue, a demented man lit a sleeping woman on fire with a match, causing the victim to burn alive and die at the scene,” Congressman Ritchie Torres wrote. “In New York, dangerous people are allowed to freely roam the subway. Yet the political establishment insists on gaslighting the public with deceptive headlines: “crime is down” and “the subways are safe.”
Police say the attack was completely unprovoked as the woman was sleeping and the man simply left his seat, walked towards her and threw the match on her body. The fire erupted immediately, the sources say. The attacker, who appeared to be in his 20s, escaped from the station. Police put out the fire but it was too late to save the woman’s life despite emergency medical assistance. She was declared dead.
The F train has not moved since the incident as police continue to assess the crime scene for evidence. The woman’s remains were placed in a black body bag and removed by about 1 p.m.
“It’s incredible,” one shocked subway user remarked as the body was moved. A Metropolitan Transit Authority told The Post that the woman appeared to be naked with her clothes “burnt off.”
“I was just walking by. The cops were there already. I didn’t see her in flames but that’s what I heard. It was out. They shut the lights off [in the car] so nobody could see,” the employee told The Post. The graphic violence disturbed him.
“That sh*t is crazy — it’s only three days until Christmas,” he noted. That’s messed up.”
The crime scene was witnessed by scores of people who were walking through down the platform. “It’s scary,” Brooklyn construction manager Alex Gureyev, 39, told The Post. “It’s going downhill a bit. Everybody keeps saying it’s going back to the seventies. It’s a frequent occurrence — not like this, setting people on fire — but like the mugging, the killings, the fighting, the shootings, they’re really common nowadays. [It’s] very bad.”
