Democracy

As Woman Burned Alive on NYC Subway Car, Bystanders Watched

07/01/2025

Dec 24, 2024

New Yorkers have long been haunted by the story of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old bartender who was raped and stabbed outside her apartment building in Queens in 1964.

The most harrowing part of the story came two weeks after the murder, when the New York Times published an article that claimed some three dozen witnesses saw or heard the attack—which lasted more than half an hour—but that no one, apart from Genovese’s neighbor, called the police or came to her aid.

Although the report was later disputed by authorities who said many of the witnesses did in fact attempt to call the police, the “bystander effect” that grew out of Genovese’s murder was enshrined as an urban legend.

The infamous story has been thrown back into the national conversation in the aftermath of the horrific murder of a woman on a New York City subway train early on Sunday, when an illegal migrant allegedly lit the passenger on fire and watched as she burned alive while the train was stopped at a Brooklyn station

In addition to the alleged killer, video of the horrifying incident shows bystanders and at least one uniformed NYPD officer appearing to casually walk by or mill about rather than render aid to the fully engulfed victim.

Gerald Posner, the journalist and author known for his investigations into the JFK assassination, called the “stomach-wrenching videos” a “digital Kitty Genovese” in a post on social media.

“I could imagine if you didn’t want to be the person who wanted to rush in and try to help them, because you’re afraid you’re going to catch on fire, you don’t know what’s going on—I get that,” Posner told Newsweek in an interview. “But the idea, then, of just not running to get the cops, as opposed to just sort of looking out at the phone and filming it… It did make me think back to that 1964 murder.”