A Post on X Falsely Identified the Victim of the NYC Subway Fire as a Woman Named Amelia Carter

Although most of the videos have been pulled from the internet, there was a brief period when footage of a woman burning to death on a New York City subway was circulating on social media. The incident occurred on Dec. 22, 2024, and shows the woman standing in a train car, barely moving, and not saying a word. The few people who witnessed this seemed to hardly be making a sound, including the man who allegedly did it.

The man allegedly responsible has since been arrested but the woman's identity remains a mystery. That is until the name Amelia Carter went viral. Who is she? Here's what we know.

Hours after the news broke of the woman's death, the X (formerly Twitter) account @minnie1254 shared a statement supposedly from the family of a woman named Amelia Carter. It was accompanied by a photo of a white woman with long brown hair. It claimed that the family of the 29-year-old woman was "devastated and heartbroken." This was allegedly posted to Instagram by Carter's family, who apparently went on to say she was a "beautiful soul who brought light into the lives of everyone who knew her."

The statement ends with the family demanding justice for Amelia Carter. This post does not fit with the rest of @minnie1254's account, which is mostly focused on cryptocurrency. According to the 6sedici website, the token ($)Amelia (Justice for Amelia) was launched at the same time. When Carter's name was shared on X by other users, a community note was added clarifying that the image was AI-generated and the original post was a cryptocurrency scam.

Very little is known about the woman who was set on fire. ABC News reported that she was believed to be asleep at around 7:30 a.m. on a stationary F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn. A few hours later, police arrested 33-year-old Sebastian Zapeta and charged him with second-degree murder and arson.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson Jeff Carter said that Zapeta is an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who entered the United States illegally but was deported in June 2018, per USA Today. At some point, he returned, though officials do not know when and how.

The New York Post spoke with the founder of Guardian Angels, a nonprofit organization "dedicated to fostering safer, stronger, and more compassionate communities through volunteer-driven initiatives," who commented on the fact that no one came to the victim's aide. "People should have been running over to the woman on fire. They did nothing. They said nothing," said Curtis Sliwa. He called this the "Daniel Penny effect" and posited that folks were afraid of what could happen to them if they helped.