The suspect who allegedly lit a sleeping passenger on fire inside a Coney Island F train sat on a bench and watched her burn to death in a shocking pre-Christmas killing — then sneaked away when unwitting cops told him they needed to “clear the space.”
In a horrifying video obtained by The Post, the man calmly looked on as flames engulfed the unidentified woman, who stood inside the open subway car door while the train idled at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station at about 7:30 a.m. on Sunday.
A transit cop walked by, and seemed to pull out his radio and say something as he continued down the platform.
After the cop passed, the suspect — who police say stands about 5-foot, 6-inches tall, weighs around 150 pounds and is about 25 to 30 years-old — got up as if to walk away before the clip cut off.
In another video, cops yelled to the gathered crowd, “Did anybody see anything? Did anybody see anything?” as smoke poured from inside the subway car.
The suspect brazenly sat on a bench right in front of the door as cops huddled around it, pulling his hood up at one point just before an officer spoke to him.
“Do me a favor? Walk down there,” the cop said, motioning down the platform with his radio. “I need this space cleared up.”
The man stood up, then left the scene. Cops say he was last seen wearing a gray hoodie, jeans, brown boots and a dark knit hat with a red band.
Authorities have ruled the case a homicide, and are offering a $10,000 reward for info that might lead to his arrest.
Investigators believe the woman was sleeping when the man — who was sitting across from the victim at the time — got up, walked over and tossed a match on her, sources said.
Cops extinguished the fire and EMS declared her dead on the scene.
Liquor bottles were laying around the victim, though it wasn’t clear if they played any part in the blaze.
On Sunday morning, cops, firefighters and medical examiner personnel clad in white Tyvek suits combed the tracks for evidence after they cordoned off the area.
Around 1 p.m., authorities carried a body bag containing the woman’s corpse out of the train and placed it on a gurney. Then they wheeled it over to a medical examiner van and moved it inside.
“It’s incredible,” one shocked commuter said as he witnessed the sad proceedings.
MTA workers were similarly stunned by the savage killing.
“It just looked like all the clothes were burnt off,” one worker told The Post. “I was just walking by. The cops was there already. I didn’t see her in flames but that’s what I heard. It was out. They shut the lights off [in the car] so nobody could see.
“That s–t is crazy — it’s only three days until Christmas,” he added. “That’s messed up.”
Other commuters stopped in their tracks to take in the stunning scene.
“It’s scary,” Alex Gureyev, a 39-year-old construction manager from Brooklyn, told The Post.
“It’s going downhill a bit,” he continued. “Everybody keeps saying it’s going back to the seventies. It’s a frequent occurrence — not like this, setting people on fire — but like the mugging, the killings, the fighting, the shootings, they’re really common nowadays. [It’s] very bad.”
The poor woman’s fiery death came just as Gov. Kathy Hochul sent 250 more National Guard troops into the Big Apple’s subway system for the holiday rush — swelling its $100 million subway deployment to 1,000 troops.
Hochul has insisted that her controversial March deployment of National Guard troops into the subways led to a dramatic drop in transit crime.
But despite the governor’s efforts, subway murders rose by at least 60% this year, according to data collected in September.
Just after midnight Sunday, an argument between five men on a southbound 7 train at Woodside Avenue and 61st Street in Queens turned deadly when a 69-year-old man stabbed one person in the chest and another in the face, police said.
The man who was stabbed in the chest died at the hospital, police said. The suspect was in custody awaiting charges.
Several hours later, at about 4:30 a.m., a northbound D train was put out of service after an angry passenger threw a can at the 38-year-old conductor, police said.
Authorities took the conductor to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he was in stable condition.
The suspect was not arrested in the attack, police added.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/22/us-news/horror-video-shows-suspect-watching-woman-burn-to-death-in-f-train-car-after-he-allegedly-set-her-on-fire/
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