Dec. 22 (UPI) — A woman is dead after intentionally being set on fire in a Brooklyn subway station Sunday, police said. A suspect is in custody.
Police said the woman was sleeping on a stationary train scheduled to travel to Brooklyn when she was approached by the suspect who used a lighter to ignite the victim’s clothing, according to New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who described the incident as “one of the most depraved crimes one person could possibly commit against another human being.”
The police apprehended someone they believe “carried out one of the most depraved crimes one person could possibly commit against another human being, and it took the life of an innocent New Yorker,” Tisch said.
Police have arrested a Guatemalan migrant in connection with the crime, local media reported. Cell phone Video taken by a bystander shows the suspect appearing to watch the woman burn after he set fire to her and officials rushing into the train car.
Police officers and a Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker used a fire extinguisher to put out the flames but the woman was pronounced dead at the scene, the police said.
The suspect exited the train as police officers on patrol in the subway station rushed to extinguish the fire.
“What they saw was a person standing inside the train car fully engulfed in flames,” Tisch said of the officers who went on the train to extinguish the fire.
The suspect was detained on another subway train and taken into custody. Officials identified the suspect using office body camera footage, according to police. They said the incident happened on an unoccupied train, and that there were no other eyewitnesses.
The female victim, whose identity has been withheld, was sleeping in a subway car at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn at about 7:30 EST when a man approached her inside the train car.
There was no interaction prior to the attack, the man is not believed to have known the woman, police said.
Crime on New York mass transit has become of increasing concern recently. A gunman fled into a nearby subway station on the Upper West Side after a shooting in the city last month. Panicked commuters took shelter and trains were delayed while police searched for the shooter.
In February, transit employees stopped working after an overnight slashing attack on a subway train injured a conductor during the morning commute, disrupting train traffic. Weeks later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul reported that she was assigning 1,000 members of the state police and National Guard to the transit systems in response to the uptick in crime.
The governor’s office announced last week that crime is down 42 percent since 2021 while ridership has increased 148 percent.