The New York police are carrying out an investigation to find the identity of the woman who died after a subway fire.
New York City police were working Monday to identify the woman who died after someone set her on fire on the subway, as well as to obtain more information about the detained man who has been labeled a “person of interest” in the crime.
Traffic Chief Joseph Gulotta said Sunday that questions about the suspect's history and whether the victim was homeless were part of an active police investigation.
Traffic police detained the man, who has not yet been publicly identified, after receiving a report from three high school students who had recognized him. They had seen images of the suspect taken from surveillance videos and police body cameras and distributed widely.
“New Yorkers responded again,” New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Sunday. He described the case as “one of the most depraved crimes a person could commit against another human being.”
Tisch said the suspect and the woman had been riding a subway train without any interaction between them until the end of the line in Brooklyn around 7:30 a.m. Sunday.
After the train stopped, surveillance video from the subway car shows the man walking “calmly” toward the victim, who was sitting motionless, possibly sleeping, and setting his clothes on fire with what appears to be a lighter. The woman's clothing then “becomes completely engulfed in flames in a matter of seconds,” Tisch said.
Police do not believe the two knew each other.
Officers on a routine patrol at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue subway station smelled and saw smoke, and discovered the woman on fire, standing in the middle of the subway car. After the fire was extinguished, emergency medical personnel pronounced the woman dead at the scene.
Unbeknownst to officers, the suspect had remained at the scene and was sitting on a bench on the subway platform just outside the train car, Tisch said. The officers' body cameras captured a “clear, detailed image” of the suspect and those images were publicly disseminated.
After receiving the call from the teenagers, other transit officers identified the man on another subway train and radiated to the next station, where more officers kept the train doors closed, searched each car and eventually detained him without incident, Gulotta said. . The man had a lighter in his pocket when he was detained, Tisch said.
The case marked the second fatality on a New York subway that Sunday.
At 12:35 a.m., police responded to an emergency call of an assault in progress at the 61st Street-Woodside station in Queens and found a 37-year-old man with a stab wound to the torso and a 26-year-old man years with multiple cuts all over his body.
The older man was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital while the younger man was in stable condition, police said.
The investigation continued.
This year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has sent the National Guard to the city's subway system to help police search passengers' bags in the wake of a series of high-profile crimes on the city's trains. city. Hochul recently deployed additional members to help patrol during the holiday season.
About a year ago, Hochul supported funding to install video cameras in every car of the New York subway system, said Michael Kemper, chief security officer for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He and other officials Sunday credited the cameras with helping locate the suspect so quickly.