The man accused of in New York has been charged this Friday with murder and arson, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office has reported, while authorities continue investigating to find out the identity of the victim, who died practically instantly as a result of the burns and smoke inhalation.
The accusation comes four days after the arrest of Sebastián Zapeta, a 33-year-old Guatemalan who entered the United States illegally, and his subsequent police interrogation, in which, according to authorities, he claimed not to know what had happened but admitted to in the images of the video surveillance camera that recorded the development of the event. Zapeta claimed not to remember anything because, he said, he had drunk a lot.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric González reported that the indictment will be made public on January 7 and that Zapeta is charged with several counts of murder, in the first and second degree, as well as arson. The main charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole. “It was a malicious act. A sleeping and vulnerable woman in our subway system,” González said.
Zapeta, whose identity was revealed a few hours after the event, and before the police did so, by Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter) to defend the mass deportation plans of the future Republican Administration, had already been initially accused in a criminal complaint of murder and arson. These types of complaints are often the first step in the criminal process because, in New York, all felony cases require a grand jury indictment to proceed to trial, unless the defendant waives that requirement.
According to the reconstruction of the events, thanks to the suburban camera system, Zapeta approached the woman last Sunday at 7:30 in the morning, who was supposedly sleeping, in a subway line F car stopped at the Coney station. Island, in Brooklyn, and set his clothes on fire with a lighter. According to the recording, Zapeta fanned the flames by fanning them with a shirt, which caused the woman to be instantly engulfed by a fireball. The accused sat on a bench on the platform and watched it burn for a couple of minutes; then he got up and disappeared from the camera’s focus. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene. Hours later, thanks to the testimony of three schoolchildren who recognized him in the photos that the police had released, he was arrested on a train on the same line.
Police and forensic doctors are working to identify the woman using fingerprints and advanced DNA techniques, while trying to reconstruct her steps before the murder but, as she is presumably homeless, identification will take time.
and, encouraged by Musk, among others, by irregular immigration. But the tycoon and , is not the only one; also the mayor of New York, Democrat Eric Adams, starting with those with criminal records. According to immigration records, Zapeta was deported in 2018 after entering illegally, but returned to the United States without authorization on a date that has not been specified. A spokesman for the mayor reported that he had been in and out of municipal shelters in recent years and that he arrived in the city before the mass influx of immigrants in the spring of 2022. His last known address, released by police after his arrest , coincides with that of a Brooklyn shelter that provides housing and assistance to drug addicts.
An event like the one supposedly carried out by Zapeta is statistically rare. Police data show that most suburban crimes decreased this year through November, compared to the same period in 2023, (a thousand members of the National Guard currently patrol platforms and stations). But homicides increased, with nine murders through November compared to five recorded in the same period last year. The figure does not include Zapeta’s victim or the man who was fatally stabbed in a Queens subway station earlier that day during an argument. , such as stabbings and pushing onto the road – several of them fatal – in a city where millions of people use the subway every day.
