According to the New York Post, among the illegal-immigrant population in the city, over 58,000 are convicted felons or facing criminal charges.
On Sunday morning — three days shy of Christmas — a woman on the subway woke up to unimaginable horror. Fire. Everywhere.
Her clothes, her hair, her whole body engulfed in flames. The Metro Transit Authority staff rushed to her aid upon smelling something burning in the car over. They quenched the flames with a fire extinguisher.
But it was too late. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Earlier that morning, the woman — who has yet to be identified — succumbed to sleep on the F train. Near the Coney Island stop, a twisted fellow rider saw his opportunity.
This deviant man, shrouded by a hoodie, tossed a match onto her sleeping body, then sat and watched her burn. He looked on her flaming figure from a bench outside the idled train, apparently entertained by her gruesome death.
The name of the man allegedly responsible for this atrocity is Sebastian Zapeta, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala. At the time of his arrest, Zapeta had been staying at a city-funded shelter — the Days Inn on 36th Street in Brooklyn. Zapeta was deported under Trump in 2018 but snuck back into the U.S. across the southern border at an unknown date.
Under Democratic New York governor Kathy Hochul — and Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams — Zapeta was clothed, fed, housed, and paid via U.S. tax dollars. He showed his gratitude to the city by allegedly committing an unspeakable crime against a sleeping woman. On Monday, Zapeta was charged with second-degree murder and first-degree arson, according to the New York Police Department.
In just the past two years, New York City has spent over $6 billion to shelter immigrants arriving from the U.S.-Mexico border. In that time, over 225,000 migrants have entered the city. Many have been given indefinite stays in converted hotels, new clothes, free medical care, food stamps, and even debit cards loaded up to $10,000.
The 2023 Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs under Mayor Eric Adams estimated that there were 412,000 illegal immigrants in the city in 2022. However, this estimate was made before the new wave of migrants entered the “sanctuary city” under Biden, so that number is almost certainly higher.
According to the New York Post, among the illegal-immigrant population in NYC, over 58,000 are convicted felons or facing criminal charges.
Representative Nicole Malliotakis — the sole Republican member of Congress representing part of New York City — told the Post, “It’s shocking that Democrats have gone so far out of their way to harbor gang members, drug traffickers and other criminals who are in our country illegally.” She continued, “In many cases, they’ve provided them with housing, food and healthcare. They need to stop using New Yorkers’ hard-earned tax dollars to shield criminals wreaking havoc on our streets and instead cooperate with ICE to have them deported.”
To top it all off, Governor Hochul posted on X a self-congratulatory announcement about how “crime is going down” on the New York subway. She posted on Sunday afternoon — the very same day that the woman was burned alive.
Hochul’s post read: “In March, I took action to make our subways safer for the millions of people who take the trains each day. Since deploying the National Guard to support NYPD and MTA safety efforts, and adding cameras to all subway cars, crime is going down, and ridership is going up.”
Readers on X weren’t having it. They left a piercing community note: “A sleeping woman aboard a subway car has died after being intentionally set on fire at Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue subway station.”
In an effort to cover up her egregious error, Hochul made another post: “Make no mistake: any crime is one too many, even with subway crime going down. We are continuing to surge personnel and resources to make our subways safer.”
A community note corrected her again: “While some subway crimes are decreasing, this homicide will bring the 2024 total to 10, tying the 25-year record set in 2022. Violent crime in NYC subways remains substantially higher than before the pandemic.”
The entire back-and-forth is a perfect modern rendition of an SNL skit from 1991. In the skit, a New York radio host named Evan (played by Kevin Nealon) invites a fictional guest onto his show — Mayor Dinkins’s “Special Assistant on Violent Crimes” named Michael Fusco. Played by Joe Mantegna, Fusco is a mobster tasked with convincing the people of New York that the crime spikes aren’t so bad after all. (He sounds extremely similar to many Democrats of today.)
Fusco begins, “Thank you, Evan. I just want to say New York is not a rotting, crime-infested hellhole. The fact is, that in violent crimes per capita, New York is No. 8 nationwide, No. 8 per capita.” He continues, in a perfect New York accent, “and we like to remind people that for every victim of a violent crime in this city, there were four people who visited the Museum of Modern Art.”
Evan, the host, then goes to the phones and takes calls from victims of crimes in the city:
Caller: “Yeah, uh, hello. I was mugged this past November in a subway. I was coming home from a Knicks game.”
Fusco: “What time was that?”
Caller: “Well, gee, it was a night game. Went into overtime. So it was about, you know, 1:15.”
Fusco: “Oh, well, come on! It’s 1:15 a.m. and you’re on the subway. What do you expect?”
Fusco’s victim-blaming carries on as the skit continues. Other callers chime in, and Fusco defends the city against its residents. However, the last caller in the skit has an eerie complaint. He says he was lit on fire — a crime no longer comedically absurd given Sunday’s events.
Final Caller: “I was doused with gasoline, set on fire, and thrown off my roof.”
Fusco: “Well, anybody who’s been set on fire and thrown off a building will tell you it’s awful. It’s just an awful experience. But unfortunately, these things happen in New York. People are going to get doused and lit on fire. Tourists are going to get pushed onto subway tracks, and little kids are gonna smoke crack and beat old people with hammers. But that’s the price you pay for living in the most vibrant, exciting city in the world.”
Hopefully, Americans will no longer accept this price. With Tom Homan soon to take charge of border control under Trump, change is on the horizon. Homan has vowed to deport known criminals first. I have one for the top of his list. . . .