New Yorkers were outraged on Monday after an illegal Guatemalan immigrant allegedly burned a sleeping passenger to death on a Brooklyn subway train, while onlookers did nothing but just watched the horror episode. The illegal immigrant also watched the woman burn to death after setting her on fire.
Disturbing video footage from the incident shows at least three bystanders, one of whom recorded the horrifying scene on his phone, and an NYPD officer standing outside the subway car as flames consumed the unidentified victim following the Sunday morning attack. The suspect ahs since been identified as Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, who was deported during the Trump era but sneaked back into US.
Silent Observers
"Nobody came to her aid," said Guardian Angels founder and community activist Curtis Sliwa. "There's no doubt that people don't want to get involved. It's the Daniel Penny factor. It's frozen people. They're saying to themselves: 'I don't want to get jammed up like Penny.
"People should have been running over to the woman on fire. They did nothing. They said nothing," Sliwa said, calling the insensitive onlookers to intervene "the Daniel Penny effect."
Penny, a 26-year-old former Marine, faced murder charges last year for fatally choking Jordan Neely, a homeless man, after Neely aggressively confronted terrified passengers on a Manhattan subway.
Earlier this month, Penny was cleared of criminally negligent homicide charges.
However, some observers believe his legal battle is causing potential Good Samaritans on the subway to hesitate before intervening.
"People are reticent about getting in the middle of criminal activity," state Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar, a Brooklyn resident, told The New York Post on Monday.
"There are a lot of New York City residents who think twice about acting because they don't think they have the support of our Democratic elected officials. They are wary of revolving door justice.
"This murder never should have happened in the first place," he said.
Total Security Lapse
Meanwhile, the chair of the state Senate committee responsible for overseeing the MTA announced on Monday that he is seeking explanations from the transit authority regarding the failures highlighted by the incident.
"We're asking for a breakdown of what happened, how it happened and why it took so long [to make an arrest]," state Sen. Leroy Comrie (D-Queens), who chairs the committee, told The New York Post on Monday.
"Because of the actions of previous administrations, it's a mess out there," Comrie said. "There are too many [mentally ill] people who should be in facilities who are out in the streets. Some of these people need to be restricted in their movements."
Disturbing footage showed a man, identified as Zapeta-Calil, calmly sitting on a bench at the station while the woman was engulfed in flames. He eventually left the scene, but police later tracked him down when he exited a subway train at the 34th Street-Herald Square station in Manhattan.
Sources indicated that charges are forthcoming, with Brooklyn prosecutors awaiting the results of an autopsy — complicated by the severely burned state of the victim's body — to determine the cause of death.
The incident has raised several questions, including why it took so long for police to respond to the burning woman, why Zapeta-Calil was allowed to leave after officers arrived, and why the fire extinguishers on the subway car were not used, according to sources.
