On the morning that Debrina Kawam died from either smoke inhalation or wounds incurred after her clothes were set on fire while sleeping on an idle F train in December, a man named Sebastian Zapeta stood in the very same subway car. Zapeta later said he had no memory of how he got there. This was not an unusual occurrence for the 33-year-old, whose neighbors at a shelter in East New York remembered him for both sending his weekly construction earnings back to his family in Guatemala and for sometimes drinking so heavily that he’d vomit in a nearby sink and forget to clean it. After initially entering the United States illegally, Zapeta was deported in 2018, then reentered the country illegally sometime after, residing in New York with in-laws until, he said, “they threw me out” during the pandemic.
It was around this same time that Kawam, 57, also started living on the street, eventually settling in New York City. She’d been the product of a fairly conventional suburban New Jersey upbringing in Toms River across the 1970s and ’80s. By the mid-aughts, Kawam had declared bankruptcy after a stint as a customer service rep: She had a busted Dodge Neon, some clothes, a TV, and a futon to her name. In November, a homeless-outreach group saw her at Grand Central Terminal and later she was assigned to a shelter in the Bronx. She never appeared at the facility.
At around 7:30 a.m. on that December day, the train holding both Kawam and Zapeta sat parked, above ground, in the Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue subway station. Zapeta wore tan construction boots and paint-splattered blue jeans. He also had in his possession, according to police, a box of cigarettes, a cellphone, $178 in cash, 80 cents in change, and a lighter—which he may or may not have used to start the blaze that NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch would later say “engulfed in a matter of seconds” Debrina Kawam’s entire body.
When detectives from the city’s 60th Precinct detained and questioned Zapeta later that day, one officer told him, “We want to know why you went to that woman in front of you and set fire to her.” Zapeta responded that he couldn’t remember. Another turned a laptop toward Zapeta with footage of the incident, to which the contractor responded simply in Spanish, “Oh, damn, that’s me.” Though he was “very sorry,” particularly “for that woman” and genuinely “didn’t mean to” do whatever they said he did, Zapeta—the man who’d just reportedly identified himself as the one lighting a fellow commuter on fire to a room full of detectives—simply did not “know what happened.”
But what exactly happened isn’t the sole thing that so many, including myself, seem to latch on to. The details—a resting rail passenger being immolated in the middle of rush hour—are indeed horrifying. But horrors, nowadays, don’t exist in vacuums. What matters in today’s public consciousness just as much as any isolated disturbance are all the other similar noises echoing off in the immediate distance. I am one in a great number of Americans currently compromised in this way by fright’s magnetic pull. We are many and we interpret our fears as stitches in larger tapestries.
For instance, when I think of the burning of Debrina Kawam, I think of it to some extent as part of a collective traumatic chronology: She died a week before the New Year’s attack in New Orleans that killed 14 and injured 57; two weeks before Los Angeles County was immersed in wildfire and buried in ash; four weeks before mass deportations and constitutionally spurious fiats began to be carried out in plain sight. (Never mind the string of various aeronautic disasters that happened soon after.) And still, closer to my home, a less publicized incident: Within a week of the first of these other, distant things, a man walked into a bodega down the block from my crib in Harlem for a sandwich and was later carried out in a body bag, having been stabbed through the chest. When I line everything up, an ultra-personal narrative weaves its way through, too: Within a month of that random act of violence, my fiancée started carrying her passport with her when she left the house because, broadly speaking, her parents were born on a half of an island that once swore fealty to the queen of Spain and, less broadly speaking, because she resides in a country wherein the marks of said fealty—a Hispanicized surname; skin tone close to cafe con leche—are increasingly a pretense for federal detainment that could possibly be averted by certain approved forms of identification.
These times are spooky. Spooky in ways that contribute to and contradict one another. But also spooky in ways that are at once real and imagined, novel and banal.
Four months have passed since the six or so states that decide every election cycle decided the last election cycle, a clash shadowed by perceptions that a given way of life is again under siege. Exposed to purported violent actors, foreign and domestic: migrants, the mentally ill, the derelict, a select number of groups on the margins. Social and psychological molecules ricochet in one field of the political periphery and yet, in sequence, another not-so-separate reaction ensues from a different flank. People are freaked out. Disturbed over mass and episodic violence brought by natural disasters or human whims. Shaken by the continent-spanning tendrils of war. Alarmed at a hodgepodge of internal political forces, nearly all of which are, in one way or another, reactions to those above-said catastrophic blues over the imperiled security of the country’s bounty.
Neither end is fully cordoned off from the other. Our recent voting history shows as much, as do the figures most able to catch and hold the public eye. If there is any certainty in these wholly uncertain times, across parties, states, factions, or interests, it is that the nation is as frightened as it has ever been. This mood is felt even in conditions when it is not particularly obvious, and especially so when it is. On subway tracks, rural routes, mountain peaks, and amber planes, the air in America is routinely thick with fear, the united sentiment of a disunited land.
We are, and have long been, moths to the light of order. It’s centripetal in an immediate political sense. Last April, a Gallup poll said six in 10 American adults felt that “reducing crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress to address.” This was both an 11 percent uptick from sentiments at the peak of the pandemic and detected across the aisle: 47 percent of Democrats agreed with 68 percent of their Republican counterparts. Exit polls after the 2024 election showed similar trends in perceptions about both presidential candidates’ aptitude in public-life-related measures like who’d best tackle safety, immigration, and crisis management (for all of which voters indicated more faith in the Republican ticket than the Democratic one).
Since Trump’s second electoral victory, there has been a tendency in corners of the political class and media to frame his pitch to the voting public in mainly economic terms. Like the narratives that sprouted around his initial rise, this misreading obscures the complicated truth that how the nation dreams about prosperity has always been attached to how it frets about safety. In the Enlightenment reflections that laid the foundation for the American Revolution, fright was deemed a central motivating and organizing force. Thomas Hobbes’s descriptions of anarchy’s perils in Leviathan didn’t just point to a lack of arts or society but “worst of all,” the “continual fear and danger” that ungoverned nature fostered among groups. Over a century later, the Declaration of Independence held not only “that all men are created equal” and “endowed” with “certain unalienable rights”—but that “it is the Right” of those same men to "institute new Government" that “shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Trace around all those lofty thoughts and you’ll spot the shape of fear as an emblem of power, a certain fright distinct to those with food in their belly and a roof over their head.
This has most often, in practice, taken the form of people harking back to some previous ordered existence, even if the vision they yearned for might not ever have included everyone within earshot. At the height of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI fiefdom, he too spoke about the delicate American “way of life,” threatened by forces determined to "destroy" its "sanctity.” Even in bulletins to bureau agents, Hoover’s most frequent bugaboo remained the looming “menace” of supposed “lawlessness.” That distaste for disorder in U.S. life outstretches any one figure and any one grievance. “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed,” the president vowed to the American people two months ago. “Our safety will be restored.”
Frontispiece of ‘Leviathan, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill’ by Thomas Hobbes, 1651
That “safety” itself is in doubt is integral to the architecture of the moment. Gallup has tracked U.S. perceptions of crime since 1993, and in all but four of their 27 studies analyzing the subject since then, at least 60 percent of adults have told them that there “is more crime nationally than there was the year before.” By nearly every measure available, that is, of course, completely divergent from statistical truth. Violent crime peaked in the early ’80s and again in the early ’90s but has been in decline nationally ever since. FBI data has the violent crime rate falling by just below half from 1993 to 2022.
That chasm between the actual crime rate and the percentage of Americans who think crime is increasing has been worsening for a while, Aubrey Etopio explained to me this winter. In her social psychology research, Etopio talks to folks all over the country about their crime-related fears, though not always in those exact terms. “People used words like ‘fear,’ and ‘concern,’ and ‘worry,’ and even ‘paranoia’—some of them all interchangeably,” said Etopio, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She thinks the disconnect partially owes to the accumulation of human psychological tendencies.
“Negative events are more impactful on somebody than positive events. And there's a pretty easy evolutionary explanation for that,” Etopio told me. “A false negative is much more costly than a false positive.” Misjudge a crocodile for a boulder and you’re likely to end up in a set of prehistoric jaws. And then consider that human brains tend to “overestimate the prevalence of something that easily comes to mind.” The ramifications of what can and can’t come to mind—the more “negative” the event the more prevalent—in an era when anything from anywhere sits at our fingertips remained the unspoken terror of our conversation.
Open up Citizen, the “essential safety app for today’s world,” and you are greeted by an animated phantasmagoria of frights. The background is formless, until it isn’t, and there are stars and an inch-or-so-sized spinning globe that looks conspicuously like the Universal Pictures logo. Once you’ve activated in-app location services, you are met by fond greetings such as, “We found 20 active incidents near you.” I declined an offer to “get information in real-time” through either a free seven-day or $1.99 30-day trial in the “Police and fire radio” content subsection but I failed to avert tapping “Live nearby safety alerts” and “Local registered offenders.”
The Citizen satellite feed is a cartographed collage of incident reports denoted by icons and emoji of traffic cones, kitchen knives, guns, police cars, open flames. In my neighborhood alone I saw an alert about "People Disputing After Two-Car Crash,” a “Report of Person Pepper Sprayed,” an incident to the south listed as “Report of Woman Armed With Black and Green Knife at Restaurant,” and a “Report of Shots Fired” to the northwest. I learned that, in total, seven registered sex offenders lived within a five-block radius of my residence. Harlem as a whole was rated as having a “crime incident volume” of “Mid to High,” but it appears that most of Manhattan would fall under the same categorization.
Citizen is one end of the modern trough in which Americans lap up their servings of fear. It is not the only outlet. According to the Pew Research Center, half of the country gets its crime-related fix from social media. Another third or so from geo-centered apps like Ring Central and Nextdoor. The lifeline of local news is crime coverage, and about three-quarters of U.S. adults say they still sometimes or often look to these sources. There is, too, a cyclical effect: Folks who watch Fox News have been found to care more about issues like drug crime, further incentivizing more coverage.
A whole branch of psychological research studies the impacts of fear consumption, and it is all eminently bleak. One report on the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing found that “six or more daily hours of bombing-related media exposure” over the first week of news coverage was linked to “higher acute stress than direct exposure” to the bombings themselves. E. Alison Holman, a UC Irvine nursing professor who led the study, told me recently that consumption of this kind of widely available content can result in “early post-traumatic stress symptoms.” The impact isn’t always definite or uniform. Most often, negative responses manifest in “intrusive memories” of a witnessed event, or attempts “to avoid” triggers associated with it.
“People are on edge, they can't sleep or they're woken up," said Holman. "Post-traumatic stress is a very fear-related disorder. … Fear and sadness to see other people who are going through those kinds of things. Fear of the terrorists, fear of the mass shooter, fear about sending your kid to school."
A brush fire burns in Pacific Palisades, California
On the ground, the mental health impacts of violent events are extensive and enduring. In those parts of the West Coast most affected by wildfires, there is a marked uptick in ER visits for anxiety disorders immediately after blazes. For years, disaster researcher Eamin Z. Heanoy and a team at the University of Alberta periodically interviewed folks in Alberta after a series of historically destructive floods in 2012. “Even after six years,” she said, “those people still showed or demonstrated lingering evidence or lingering symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety.” Digital scenes, like those recently relayed from L.A.—palm fronds aglow, homes charred to rubble, whole communities displaced in the shadow of smokey hillsides—can function like other violent media, too, becoming emotional pipelines in the wake of distant events. “Proximity obviously is a factor, but even if you don’t live in the ground zero,” Heanoy told me, “it still could impact you.”
This reaches into other outlets that serve the terror-consumption cycle. In the pre-internet landscape all pain (while no less felt) was local. With the internet, what gives all forms of destruction their double-edged blade is their everpresence, their relatability, and their inescapability. The things that go on in someone’s backyard are no longer confined to their backyard. People don’t have to be caught in an immigration raid to be spooked by it. Listeners needn’t be in earshot of a firearm to hear it crack. “The stuff has not been filtered. It's not been reviewed by an editorial board or considered by an editorial board for whether or not it should be shown,” Holman said. “Between social media and the 24/7 access to media and the lack of monitoring of what gets put there, [it] has made images and stories about these horrific events ubiquitous.”
It is a dilemma that appears to be compounding too. In Holman’s 2019 study, she and her cowriters found evidence that contact with “repeated trauma-related media coverage” produced a sensitizing effect in research subjects. They uncovered that interaction with suffering-based content begets increased “distress responses” to other similar displays later. If our minds and bodies are ill-equipped to contend with even second-hand violence in the present, what this finding suggests is that overexposure lowers our tolerance for it into the future. That’s as much a personal conundrum as it is an environmental one. No one chooses the air they breathe, but eventually everyone has to inhale.
When the flame that would swallow—in vastly differing ways—both Debrina Kawam and Sebastian Zapeta was lit, it ignited on local kindling of sorts. The kind of bed, layered and spread over time with different forms of tinder, that sparks a frenzy beyond the fetters of ordinary conventions like personal observation or even general truth. By the end of 2024, New Yorkers had heard much about carnage and disorder.
In March the subject du jour was that a man had been shot with his own firearm after brandishing it at a subway stop in downtown Brooklyn. In June, we were told, a man killed another passenger at a station at 175th Street by stabbing him repeatedly in the torso. In November, the news said three people were stabbed in broad daylight across Manhattan, all of them by the same man, all of them in the same 2.5-hour span. To bookend the mid-December burning incident, on New Year’s Eve a bystander was shoved into the path of an oncoming subway car, fracturing his skull.
All of this is to say nothing of the high-profile trial of Daniel Penny, a white Marine Corps veteran who had choked to death a distressed Black, unhoused F train passenger named Jordan Neely the previous May. In early December, after the trial had stretched for months and metastasized into regular right-wing news fodder, Penny was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide after a separate charge of second-degree manslaughter had previously been dismissed. The mere threat of subway violence led Penny to choke the life out of Neely, led a jury of their peers to exonerate him for this act, and led a segment of the population to fete the executioner as both victim and hero in response. (Soon after the trial ended, Vice President–elect JD Vance invited Penny—a “good guy” with a “backbone”—to be a guest of honor at the Army-Navy football game, while the New York Post churned out articles chronicling developments like Penny’s “meet-cute” with a “brunette bombshell” podcaster).
None of these incidents are, in the long view, particularly out of the ordinary considering the immense number of commuters, pedestrians, and people generally moving in the nation’s largest metropolitan area at any given moment. There were slightly more violent attacks on or near subways in 2024 than in the five years preceding it, but the number of felony assaults reported amount to a fraction of both the citywide total and citywide rate. Sexual violence rates were in line with the rest of the city and country. Theft and murder were both below that.
Daniel Penny
You could be forgiven for not knowing this by riding the subway. I’ve personally seen many kinds of people on New York’s rail system—people with dogs and kids and bags and wheelchairs and bikes and bare feet and, sometimes, people who were very hungry. Occasionally I’ve even given those same very-hungry neighbors food, though sometimes I haven’t, and in the background there’s usually someone over an intercom saying “attention passengers” or “this is an express train” or basically just telling us not to do some stupid shit. But I’ve never seen anything on any subway that was a different kind of dangerous than that exhibited all over the country beyond it, and I’ve never been particularly worried. I’m in the minority, though, if not factually then at least opinion-wise: Last spring’s MTA report card had only 45 percent percent of residents indicating they felt safe on board.
Our nearest elected officials have increasingly made a show of hearing them—often belatedly and, almost just as often, to mixed effect. In the last year, New York mayor and federal collaborator Eric Adams has added 1,200 cops to the city’s 472-station system, after spending the majority of his three years in office describing violent MTA events as either “driven by people with mental health issues” or the product of an unruly “surge in recidivism.” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez has likewise pegged the spate of random violent acts as the product of “mental illness, particularly among our unhoused population,” even as the unhoused continue overwhelmingly to be more likely the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators of it. Governor Kathy Hochul, for her part, deployed the National Guard in stations throughout the city, once in March and again in December, encouraging them to conduct regular bag checks.
Nationally, the political climate surrounding this subgenre has been immensely volatile—even if the discourse has been calculated. That some combination of nativist pet-eating conspiracies, amplifications of ongoing immigrant “invasions,” and eerily unifying vows to crush a Venezuelan prison gang were the company lines often toed by the right all campaign season was no accident. As it relates to Kawam’s death, the local officeholders whose work prospects are next up for grabs seem to have noticed and look dead set on shoring up their disorder-busting bona fides through this case—a collision of transit crime, homelessness, mental illness, and migration—in particular.
Hours after the burning, Hochul posted a message on social media assuring New Yorkers that, on the subway front, “crime is going down, and ridership is going up.” Within two days, Adams called it “a level of evil that cannot be tolerated.” Then on January 14, Hochul used her State of the State speech to announce that NYPD officers will, for the next six months, patrol every subway train from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily (at the state’s expense). The governor also made sure to mention that “we cannot allow our subway to be a rolling homeless shelter.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul
In Brooklyn, the district attorney entrusted with pursuing justice for Kawam branded her a “sleeping” and “vulnerable” rider of “our subway system”—a choice description by a man who’d later blame members of the same “unhoused population” for a general feeling of communal “unease” and a rash of “random acts of violence.” He failed, both at the time and since, to make a distinction between which members of New York’s vagrant underclass need protecting and which disrupt the city’s apparent sense of ease. We still don’t know why Zapeta did what he did on the morning of December 22, 2024, but the fact that the elected officials tasked with preventing it from happening in the first place seem to have either ignored or danced around the reality that this was an instance of one unhoused man admittedly lighting fire to an unhoused woman muddles all of their responses to the point of irrelevance.
Sometimes what we fear is not what we ought to.
Then again, other times it is.
Debrina Kawam was asleep and then they needed nine days to identify her charred body at the morgue. Zapeta is sitting in a jail on an island called Rikers. The mayor of the city in which this occurred appeared to be headed somewhere similar. At the moment, he is not: five criminal counts, all of them sanctioned by a grand jury, and later, all of them ordered to be dropped. He agreed to work with our nation’s 45th and now 47th president on federal immigration priorities, giving ICE a dubiously legal hub on that very same island. Seven members of the Justice Department resigned over the whole ordeal. Their fears, in addition to very many others, may not prove unfounded.
