By Jonathan Allen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Police arrested a man on Sunday morning who allegedly set fire to a woman while she appeared to be asleep on a New York subway train, killing her.
The woman, who was not 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 person stepped in. calmly approached her and used a lighter to adjust her clothes caught fire, New York police 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 the station rushed towards the fires.
“What they saw was a person standing inside the train car that was completely engulfed in flames,” New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference.
Cellphone video posted to social media by a horrified onlooker showed a man sitting on a bench on the platform just feet from the burning woman, wearing a gray hoodie that resembles the one worn by the suspect arrested later Sunday.
When asked if the man watching from the bench was the attacker, police said responding officers had no reason to believe he was a suspect when they rushed to the help of 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 he was riding the subway later Sunday.
Police said they were still investigating the identity of the victim and the reason for the attack.
About 4 million trips are made each weekday on the city’s subway, where violent crime is relatively rare. As of November, nine homicides had been reported in the metro in 2024, compared to five during 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 was angrily shouting at passengers on a subway train when Penny grabbed him from behind and held him for several minutes.
