By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Police arrested a man they said set a woman on fire while she appeared to be asleep on a New York City subway train on Sunday morning, killing her.
The woman, who has not been identified, was sitting motionless aboard a stopped F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue subway station in Brooklyn around 7:30 a.m. (12:30 GMT) when an unknown man approached calmly to it and used a lighter to light it. his clothes on fire, the New York Police Department said. Police said there was no interaction before the attack and they did not believe the two people knew each other.
The man got out of the car as police officers patrolling at the station rushed toward the fire.
“What they saw was a person standing inside the train car completely engulfed in flames,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference.
Cellphone video posted to social media by a horrified bystander showed a man sitting on a bench on the platform just steps away from the burning woman, wearing a gray hoodie resembling the one worn by the man. suspect arrested later Sunday.
When asked if the man watching from the bench was the attacker, police said the responding officers had no reason to believe he was a suspect when they rushed to the woman’s aid.
Officers used fire extinguishers to put out the fire and emergency services pronounced the woman dead at the scene, police said.
Police arrested a suspect, who has not been publicly identified, while riding the subway later Sunday.
Police said they were still investigating the identity of the victim and the motive for the attack.
About 4 million trips are made each weekday on the city’s subway, where violent crime is relatively rare. Until November, nine homicides had been reported in the subway in 2024, compared to five in the same period in 2023, according to police data.
Earlier this month, a jury acquitted Daniel Penny of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless former Michael Jackson impersonator, on the city’s subway. Neely had been yelling angrily at passengers on a subway train when Penny grabbed him from behind and strangled him for several minutes.