Investigators Using Video Surveillance to Identify Subway Burn Victim

The Brooklyn district attorney said the police were trying to retrace the woman’s steps to find a clear picture of her face. The man accused of killing her has been indicted on a first-degree murder charge.

Investigators are using video surveillance, fingerprint technology and DNA evidence to try to identify the woman who was fatally burned by another passenger inside a subway train on Coney Island three days before Christmas, Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said on Friday.

Mr. Gonzalez also said that prosecutors had charged Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, with first-degree murder for the Sunday morning attack. The police said he used a lighter to set the woman’s clothing on fire while she was sleeping on the train at about 7:30 a.m.

She died from the burns and smoke inhalation in a gruesome incident that was recorded on cellphone video, capturing the screams of bystanders and spreading rapidly across social media.

“It’s a priority for me, for my office, for the police department to identify this woman so we can notify her family of what had happened to her,” Mr. Gonzalez said during a news conference on Friday outside of Kings County Supreme Court.

Earlier on Friday, at a brief hearing, prosecutors said that a grand jury had indicted Mr. Zapeta-Calil on Thursday on one count of first-degree murder, three counts of second-degree murder and one count of arson.

Mr. Zapeta-Calil did not appear at the hearing. His lawyer, Andrew G. Friedman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under state law, people can be charged with first-degree murder if during the course of that crime they were also committing arson.

Mr. Gonzalez said that he and his prosecutors would do “everything in our power to hold” Mr. Zapeta-Calil accountable for a crime committed against “a sleeping, vulnerable woman on our subway system.”

“This was a malicious deed,” he said. “This was intentional.”

The killing of the woman, who appeared to be homeless, renewed the conversation over New York’s challenges with homelessness, mental illness and immigration. City leaders denounced the attack as depraved and horrific, while Republican politicians seized on it as another opportunity to decry the crime as a failure of immigration policies under President Biden.

Federal immigration officials said Mr. Zapeta-Calil was an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who had been deported in 2018, only to illegally return to the United States. It is unclear when he returned. The address he gave the police after his arrest was a homeless shelter in Brooklyn for men with drug and mental health problems.

Mayor Eric Adams has said that migrants accused of crimes do not deserve due process. On Monday, he said that immigrants who impeded other people’s pursuit of the “American dream” were not welcome.

His spokeswoman, Kayla Mamelak Altus, said on Friday that the mayor and Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner, had directed the police to work with federal officials “to explore criminal charges against Mr. Zapeta-Calil under the federal arson statute.”

On Friday, Mr. Gonzalez said that he believed “very strongly that this case belongs in state court,” where Mr. Zapeta-Calil would face life in prison without parole if he were convicted.

Murder in the first degree is “the most serious statute in New York state law,” he said. “My office is very confident about the evidence in this case and our ability to hold Zapeta accountable for his dastardly deeds.”

Ms. Mamelak Altus said the mayor was not calling for the case to be moved out of state court, but was seeking additional federal charges “given how depraved this act was.”

The woman did not appear to know her killer. 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, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Mr. Gonzalez said investigators were looking at surveillance cameras on the subway system to find footage of the woman before she boarded the train.

“We’re working on trying to go back and trace when she entered the subway system,” he said. The goal is to determine “if there is a clear shot of her face.”

Investigators used the city’s vast surveillance system to retrace the steps of the person who killed Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, on Dec. 4. After analyzing hundreds of hours of footage, the police were able to find one clear picture of the face of the man they believed shot Mr. Thompson, 50.

Five days after that killing, an employee at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., called 911 to report a customer who resembled the man in the picture released by New York police. Manhattan prosecutors have charged Luigi Mangione, 26, with first degree murder for the killing of Mr. Thompson.

The footage of the Dec. 22 killing on the F train also showed a police officer walking by the woman, as she was in flames. The officer appears to walk past her without helping her, which led to public outrage and shock.

Joseph Gulotta, the department’s chief of transit, has praised the officer’s actions, saying he “did his job perfectly.” The officer stayed, trying to preserve the crime scene as other officers rushed to get fire extinguishers, he said during a news conference following the attack.

On Friday, Mr. Gonzalez also defended the officer.

“We believe that the officer, considering all the circumstances, all the smoke and flames that were in the train car at that time, did the most that he could do,” he said.