"Critics say bystanders stood by while illegal migrant allegedly burned woman to death on NYC subway: ‘Daniel Penny effect’.....New Yorkers were up in arms Monday one day after an illegal Guatemalan immigrant allegedly burned a sleeping stranger to death aboard a Brooklyn subway train — while bystanders did nothing.
“Nobody came to her aid,” said Guardian Angels founder and community activist Curtis Sliwa. “There’s no doubt that people don’t want to get involved. It’s the Daniel Penny factor. It’s frozen people. They’re saying to themselves: ‘I don’t want to get jammed up like Penny. People should have been running over to the woman on fire. They did nothing. They said nothing,” Sliwa said, calling the reluctance of bystanders to intervene “the Daniel Penny effect.”
Penny, a 26-year-old ex-Marine, was charged with murder last year for fatally choking vagrant Jordan Neely after Neely aggressively confronted frightened passengers on a Manhattan subway car.....according to some observers, his legal ordeal is giving would-be subway good Samaritans pause.....a migrant, identified by federal immigration officials as 33-year-old Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, was charged after the grisly incident on a Coney Island subway train.
Disturbing video captured a man identified as Zapeta-Calil calmly sitting on a bench at the station while the woman burned. He left the scene but cops caught up with him later when he stopped off a subway train at the 34th Street-Herald Square station in Manhattan.
But the incident has raised several questions, including why it took cops so long to get to the burning woman, why Zapeta-Calil was allowed to leave the scene after cops arrived and why required fire extinguishers on the subway car weren’t put to use, sources said." NYP
