Police arrested a man they said set a woman on fire while she appeared to be asleep on a New York City subway train 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. when an unknown man calmly approached her and used a lighter to set his clothes on fire, the NYPD said. According to authorities, 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 the station ran toward the fire.
“What they saw was a person standing inside the train car completely engulfed in flames,” New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference.
Mobile phone video posted to social media by a horrified bystander showed a man sitting on a bench on the platform steps away from the burning woman, wearing a gray hoodie resembling the one the suspect was wearing. , arrested later Sunday.
When asked if the man watching from the bench was the attacker, police said the responding officers had no reason to think he was a suspect when they ran to help the woman.
Officers used fire extinguishers to put out the fire and the woman was pronounced dead at the scene by emergency services, 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 every weekday on the city’s subway, where violent crime is relatively rare. As of November, nine homicides had been recorded on 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 restrained him in a chokehold for several minutes.
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