The man accused of burning a woman to death inside a New York City subway train has been indicted on state charges, a prosecutor said on Friday, as authorities continue working to confirm the victim’s identity.
The indictment comes days after Sebastian Zapeta’s arrest and subsequent police questioning, in which authorities say he claimed not to know what had happened but identified himself in photos and surveillance video showing the fire being lit.
Zapeta’s indictment will be unsealed on Jan. 7, according to prosecutors. He remains jailed at the city’s Rikers Island complex.
Zapeta, 33, who federal immigration officials said is a Guatemalan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally, was initially charged in a criminal complaint with murder and arson. Such filings are often a first step in the criminal process because, in New York, all felony cases require a grand jury indictment to proceed to trial unless a defendant waives that requirement.
Authorities say Zapeta approached the woman, who might have been sleeping on the train, on a stopped F train at Brooklyn’s Coney Island station, and set her clothing on fire with a lighter on Sunday morning. He fanned the flames with a shirt, causing her to become engulfed in flames, authorities said.
Zapeta then sat on a bench on the platform and watched as she burned, prosecutors allege. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez told reporters Friday that police and medical examiners are working to identify the woman using fingerprints and advanced DNA techniques, while also retracing her steps before her killing.
Police took Zapeta into custody while he was riding a train on the same line later that day.
A Brooklyn address for Zapeta released by police after his arrest matches a shelter that provides housing and substance abuse support.
Federal immigration officials said he was deported in 2018 but returned to the U.S. illegally sometime after that.
The harrowing episode has renewed concerns about safety in the nation’s largest mass transit system.
(AP)
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3 Responses
Why waste all this time & money?
Just give him a $1,500 debit card, $3,000 in food stamps, a paid apartment for a year, an MTA pass good for 2 years, a free iPhone with unlimited everything, & season tickets to the Yankees.
That’s what is going to happen anyway so let’s just do it now & save the cost of a trial.
The headline which includes the fact that the killer is an illegal immigrant as an integral part of the story seems to be in support Trump’s claims that illegal immigrants are in his words “rapists and murderers” and that they pose a major threat to the security of the people of America. Now while there are obvious reasons why nations have borders and why America cannot have an open southern border, the idea that those who cross into the country illegally have a greater chance of killing people is simply not true. People who have it in them to murder another human being are by definition not normal, and as all types of abnormality in people they are statistically a very small minority and their rates are all within the low single digits per 100,000 in every society in the world (with the exception of American blacks who have a murder rate of 47 per 100,000.) So the idea that those who cross into the US illegally have extremely high rates of those capable of murder, especially of the senseless type, has both no logical basis and is contradicted by the facts. The murder rate for the over 8 million who entered illegally just during the Biden years is certainly not higher than that of Americans, in reality its actually much lower.
If only she had a Daniel Penny. But New York wanted to throw him in jail for life for saving the passengers on the train. So instead – because Joe Biden reversed all of Trump’s policies and opened wide the border he had closed, and because New York politicians decided to persecute and prosecute those who step up to save the weak, there was no Daniel Penny to be found.
Obviously the responsibility belongs to the murderer but just as obviously he was aided and abetted by the Democrat party.