Bill Melugin/X Sebastian Zapeta-Calil
The suspect whom police accuse of setting a sleeping woman ablaze on a New York subway train is an illegal alien from Guatemala.
And what’s worse, the New York Post revealed, he was deported under the Trump administration, only to jump the border again. Then he traveled to New York for free room and board, courtesy of city taxpayers.
Horrifying video posted to X shows the woman ablaze. And in something of a dark commentary on how out of touch far-left New York Democrats are, Governor Kathy Hochul told her followers on X how safe the city’s subways are … about eight hours after the woman was murdered.
Worse still, the woman burned alive as passersby recorded her death on phones.
(NOTE: THE VIDEOS IN THE TWEETS BELOW ARE EXTREMELY DISTURBING.)
The Murder
Cops have identified Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, a Guatemalan, illegal-alien vagrant, as the killer of the woman.
They answered reports about a fire at about 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, the Post reported, at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue subway station.
“She was found with liquor bottles surrounding her, though it was not immediately clear if they played any part in the fire,” the newspaper reported, citing police sources. “Investigators believe that the woman was sleeping when a man sitting across from her got up, walked by her and threw a match on her, engulfing her in fire,” the sources told the Post.
A later story said that Zapeta-Calil set the woman ablaze with a lighter. After that, he watched his victim burn until he walked away.
The Post also revealed that he had jumped the border in Arizona in 2018, but was quickly deported. He then entered the country illegally again and landed in New York.
“By April 2023 he was staying at a Days Inn hotel on 36th Street which had been converted into a migrant shelter — the first of four tax-funded facilities in the city,” the Post reported:
When he was issued a transit ticket in 2023, he gave an address of a shelter on Randall’s Island, the sources said.
Hochul: Everything’s Fine on the Subway!
The Post published two stories about the murder before Hochul wrote that the subways were safer because of her tough-on-crime policies.
One story was updated at 2:07 p.m.; another was updated at 2:24 p.m.
“In March, I took action to make our subways safer for the millions of people who take the trains each day,” Hochul wrote at 3:40 p.m.:
Since deploying the @NationalGuardNY to support @NYPDnews and @MTA safety efforts and adding cameras to all subway cars, crime is going down, and ridership is going up.
Hochul also had the gall to post video that showed her riding the subway.
“No One Is Helping Her”
Though police haven’t identified the victim, multiple X and Facebook accounts say she is 29-year-old Amelia Carter. Fury has erupted about what appears to be a cop calmly walking by her as she burns alive. Yet another shows the suspect fanning the flames as people watch.
“She’s burning alive, and no one is helping her. Instead, the people are using their phones to get some video,” X user Jacque Line wrote. “What a sick society.”
“Outrage over failure to act by policeman who stood idly by as Amelia Carter’s body was set ablaze, refusing to intervene or seek assistance despite clear opportunity to do so,” another user wrote.
“Who is the cop who just continued to walk past Amelia Carter as she was burning alive on the subway the other day?” a third wrote:
Why didn’t he try to put out the fire, call for help? Why did he keep walking? He needs to be identified and answer these questions. He needs to be held accountable.
A reader’s note explains that the most widely used image on X is not Carter. A second image appears with the biography of a doctoral student called Amelia Carter at the University of Pennsylvania. According to the biography:
Carter earned an MS in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah in 2023, succesfully [sic] defending her thesis “Gazing at Queer Ecological Precarity: A Fugitive Map of Fire Island, New York,[“] which “examines the confluence of class, climate, and colonialism on Fire Island, a historically LGBTQ-friendly barrier island approx. 40 miles east of America’s largest city. By examining private property regimes and National Park Service place-making projects along the Seashore, she (de)constructs Queer Ecology upon shifting beach sands.”
For his part, Zapeta-Calil is charged with first- and second-degree murder as well as arson, the Post reported.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a source told the newspaper, will likely lodge a detainer against him.
Unhappily, New York has abolished the death penalty. That means taxpayers will pay to support the illegal alien if he lands a sentence of life behind bars.
