By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2024-12-31 15:56:07 | Updated at 2025-01-07 22:05:44
1 week ago
Cops have identified the woman who was lit on fire as she slept and then burned to death on a Brooklyn subway train while terrified straphangers watched in horror, law-enforcement sources said Tuesday.
The woman was sleeping on an F train at the Stillwell Avenue-Coney Island station in Brooklyn around 7:30 a.m. on Dec. 22 when she was set on fire — with illegal Guatemalan immigrant Sebastian Zapeta-Calil now facing first-degree murder charges in the sick attack.
Horrifying video footage shows the accused killer fanning the flames as the woman burned — and calmly watching the scorched victim from a bench on the platform.
The Coalition for the Homeless described her as homeless.
The woman’s ID is being withheld pending family notification.
A source told The Post she was alive when she was set on fire, with a walker and several bags nearby.
The city medical examiner struggled to identify the body because it was so severely burned in the attack, relying largely on dental records when it became impossible to pull fingerprints.
Zapeta-Calil, who was arraigned on first- and second-degree murder and arson charges, is being held at Rikers Island without bail pending.
Federal immigration officials said he entered the US illegally in 2018 but was deported less than a week later — only to find his way back into the country and to the Big Apple.
By March 2023, he was living in the New York City shelter system.
A pal at the Brooklyn facility where he last shacked up told The Post the migrant was addicted to smoking the synthetic drug K2 and drank heavily on a daily basis.
The accused killer allegedly told cops he was so high he didn’t remember lighting the fire.
“He smoked K2, drank and bugged out,” said shelter resident Raymond Robinson, who slept in a cot at the facility next to Zapeta-Calil until his arrest.
“He would bug out and talk to himself when he was high, but never harmed nobody but himself,” Robinson said. “That’s why this s–t f–ked my head up because I slept next to him and he was never like that. I wouldn’t leave my daughter with anybody but he was the type of dude I could trust.
“As long as he wasn’t high,” he added.
Robinson said Zapeta-Calil liked to drink Voda vodka, “the cheapest s–t there is.”
