Photo: AFP
In a city where few events surprise anyone on the subway anymore, Sunday morning’s murder of a sleeping homeless woman who was set on fire on an F train was genuinely shocking to almost everyone. Perhaps the most shocking element of the crime was that the suspect, who police apprehended a few hours later, calmly sat on a bench in the Coney Island station and watched the woman burn to death. That incident came on the heels of another incident in Woodside on the 7 train, in which two people were stabbed, one of them fatally. WOR street reporter Natalie Migliore hit the Columbus Circle A/B/C/D station for the WOR Morning Show to ask New Yorkers what they think of the subways in the wake of the tragedies.
Migliore found one man who told co-hosts Larry Mendte and Laura Curran that we’ve gotten used to bad behavior on the rails. “I don’t want to seem blasé, but it’s like it’s one of the things that we have just gotten used to and we just turn the page about it. There’s another person who’s going to be set on fire tomorrow, another person’s going to fall in front of the subway tomorrow, another person’s going to be attacked, somebody else is- you’re going to be harassed today, I’m going to be harassed today. It just goes on.”
The unnamed suspect in the torching is a Guatemalan migrant who snuck back into the country after being caught entering in 2018. One straphanger, however said that fact doesn’t matter. “It doesn’t matter where you’re from to be twisted and wired that way. You could be born and bred right here in New York City, be here in the U.S., or you could be from somewhere south of the border, and obviously this person had criminal intent in their background and just had to go ahead and do this thing because that’s the way they’re wired.”
But one woman summed her attitude up succinctly for Migliore when she simply said, “It is a big deal to me- I don’t want nobody to set me on fire.”
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