In revolutionary France, public executions were entertainment events. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens created Madame Defarge and memorably described her blissfully knitting beside the guillotine as its blade drops on another aristocrat’s neck.
In the centuries spanning pre-civil rights in America, crowds would gather to watch, or even participate in, racist murders, many of them communal lynchings.
Some people have always had an atavistic need to torment other human beings, and some people have always had a ghoulish desire to watch them do it.
On 22 December, this was on full and monstrous display in New York City, specifically on a stationary F Train in Brooklyn’s Coney Island station. A homeless woman, 57-year-old Debrina Kawam, was sitting on the train, apparently sleeping, when Sebastian Zapeta-Calil walked over to her, took a lighter from his pocket, and set her on fire. Her clothes instantly ignited, and, screaming, she began to burn.
Zapeta-Calil watched her burn for a while and then, unsatisfied, took off his jacket to fan the flames.
An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, Zapeta-Calil was deported in 2018 and later reentered the US illegally, according to federal immigration authorities. This is his first arrest in the U.S. He has told the authorities he has no memory of the attack, as he was intoxicated at the time. That seems to defy credibility.
In high school, Ms. Kawam had been a cheerleader with what her classmates called a “million-dollar smile.” She had hopes of becoming an airline flight attendant. That never worked out, and, after a number of setbacks, she wound up homeless on a New York F Train in late 2024 waiting for her rendevous with a horrid destiny.
Zapeta-Calil and Ms. Kawam were apparently total strangers. When he boarded the train in Queens, she was already on it, and they rode the same train for the long journey to its terminus in Coney Island, an official told reporters. Homeless people often ride the trains as far as they go in New York City to keep warm in the winter.
You might think from reading this that the burning lady and the arsonist man were the only people there. You’d be wrong. There were a number of people on the platform — as well as two police officers — none of whom moved one inch closer to help. CCTV video shows one of the police officers glancing at the burning woman but making no move to help her; his partner strides in the other direction, speaking into a walkie-talkie without slowing down in the face of the F Train immolation.
Eventually, police officers appeared with a fire extinguisher to douse the flames, but by then Ms. Kawam was long dead.
In addition to failing to aid the victim, Police didn’t even detain Zapeta-Calil, who stood right there in front of them. He wasn’t arrested until hours later in another subway station. For some reason beyond me, a Police Department spokesman later commended the officers on the platform for doing their job “perfectly.”
And how do we know all this? Because the patrons waiting for their trains, rather than trying to help, decided instead to become Steven Spielbergs and film the event on their phones.
Ms. Kawam died in unimaginable agony. She was burned to such an unrecognizable state it took nine days to identify her by analyzing fingerprints, dental information, and DNA evidence.
And lest you decide to quickly move on from this tragedy, I thought it might be helpful if you could put a face to the unfortunate lady. Here is her high school photo from 40 years ago showing so much hope and promise. The girl next door. America’s sweetheart.
The story of Debrina Kawam calls to memory one of the most notorious crimes in New York City’s history. It happened in 1964, and it is the story of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese, a bar worker, who was on her way home from work at 2:00 AM, on 13 March, when she was approached by a man named Winston Moseley, who was waving a knife at her. She ran, screaming, but he caught her in her apartment’s entryway, where he raped her three times and then stabbed her to death. After her murder, the nation learned that 38 people, most of them neighbors, saw or heard what was happening, yet did nothing to help. No one called the police. At Moseley’s trial, prosecutors called five of the neighbors to testify. All said they saw or heard the attack, but none seemed to think what they were actually seeing or hearing was really something terrible that was actually happening. Besides, it wasn’t their business.
What have we become that we can let a person burn to death in front of us, or suffer rape and stabbing death without lifting the proverbial finger to help?
Psychologists attribute this to the Bystander Effect. In the late 1960s, John M. Darley and Bibb Latané (1968) initiated an extensive research program on the “bystander effect.” In their seminal article¹, they found that any person who was the sole bystander helped, but only 62% of the participants intervened when they were part of a larger group of five bystanders.
The more witnesses, the less likely any one person will intervene, as the Kawam and Genovese cases demonstrate.
In Ms. Kawam’s case, police and New York train riders have offered their own ideas for why no one tried to help. They told reporters it’s a matter of the subway system being a dangerous place where you must never make eye contact and at all times keep your head down. But all the gruesome videos of this obscenity that were posted on social media — most of which have now been deleted — suggest there could not have been many downed heads.
Perhaps we have simply become a society of Madame Defarges. If cell phones had existed in 1964, I have no doubt there would have been quite a few videos of the final minutes in the life of Kitty Genovese.
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¹ Darley J. M., Latané B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 377–383.
