Her name was Debrina Kawam, though we didn’t learn that until nine days after she was burned alive in a New York City subway station. On the morning of Dec. 22 she was murdered in public, in full view of witnesses; it took so long to establish her identity because so little of her was left by the time the flames were extinguished. Eventually police were able to put a name to the victim by analyzing fingerprints, dental information, and DNA evidence.

Kawam was 57 and apparently homeless. In her teens, according to her high school yearbook, she had been a cheerleader with what her classmates called a “million-dollar smile” and hopes of becoming an airline stewardess. But her life took an unhappy trajectory — illness, bankruptcy, a chaotic romantic life, arrests for drinking in public, a stay in a municipal shelter.

On the Sunday before Christmas, she was sleeping on a stationary F train in Brooklyn’s Coney Island station — probably to escape the freezing weather outside — when a man, who appears to have been a stranger, used a lighter to set her on fire. Kawam’s clothing instantly went up in flames. In ghastly videos posted online, she can be seen standing in the doorway of the train, a writhing human inferno, burning to death as the man accused of starting the fire sits on a bench. After calmly watching for a while from a nearby bench, the alleged arsonist — later identified as Sebastian Zapeta-Calil and charged with first-degree murder — got up, walked back to the train, and used a jacket or a blanket to vigorously fan the flames.

By the time police officers finally appeared with a fire extinguisher to douse the flames, Kawam was dead. No one had tried to save her.

Video of the incident shows several spectators on the platform watching from a few feet away, some using their phones to record the atrocity. Two uniformed cops can be seen walking right past the immolation. One glances at the burning woman but makes no move to help her; the other strides in the other direction, speaking into a walkie-talkie without slowing down. Off-camera, a man can be heard shouting, “This is a person right here!” and “Oh, no!” But of the people visible in the clips posted on social media, none evinces concern or sympathy; none makes a move to intervene; none does anything but watch.

Many aspects of the grisly crime provoked discussion in the days that followed. “The nightmarish attack,” observed The New York Times, “seemed almost like a collage of social problems the city is facing: homelessness, random transit crime, illegal immigration, substance abuse.” So much of what happened that day was egregious. The officers who were on the scene not only failed to aid the victim, they didn’t even detain Zapeta-Calil, who stood right there. He wasn’t arrested until hours later in another subway station. Nevertheless, the Police Department spokesman commended the cops for doing their job “perfectly.”

Even more delusional was the response of New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Just hours after Kawam was burned to death, the governor went to a subway station to pose for selfies with passengers and to brag about how much safer the system has become on her watch. “Crime is going down, and ridership is going up,” she later posted on X — a reaction of unimaginable tone deafness after what had happened that morning.

Other commentary focused on the fact that Zapeta-Calil was an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who had been deported at least once before, on the critical need for more psychiatric facilities to which mentally ill street people can be committed, and on the harm caused by revolving-door criminal-justice policies that allow dangerous offenders to be repeatedly released back to the streets.

To my mind, however, the most horrifying aspect of the whole episode was the serene indifference of the bystanders as they watched a woman die in torment. It brought to mind one of the most notorious crimes in New York history, the protracted rape and fatal stabbing of Kitty Genovese in 1964. That murder acquired lasting infamy when it was later reported that numerous neighbors — exactly how many is uncertain — saw or heard what was happening yet did nothing to help.

A popular explanation for the failure of onlookers to act in Kawam’s case was that they feared ending up like Daniel Penny, the former Marine who was charged with homicide in the death of Jordan Neely last spring.

“How we got to this lamentable place is no mystery,” Noah Rothman wrote in National Review. The prosecution of Penny “for defending his fellow subway riders against a dangerous menace had precisely its intended effect: to compel law-abiding New Yorkers to think twice before they engage in selfless acts.” Because of what happened to Penny, Rothman contends, there is no longer any “culture of heroism” in places like New York. Confronted with an aggressive hooligan or a woman being burned to death, residents and commuters “have concluded, quite rationally, that they are better off keeping their heads down.”

I’m not so sure. People don’t pull out their phones and press “Record” when they see someone in the throes of an excruciating death because of an instinct to keep their heads down. More likely, they do so out of an impulse to gawk. They do so out of an impulse to capture a titillating and macabre diversion. Some may even do so out of an impulse to score a viral hit on social media.

I can understand how a bystander on that F train platform, confronted with the fearsome sight of a woman burning alive, might hold back from doing something out of fear of catching fire, or from lack of anything with which to smother the flames, or from sheer paralyzing panic. But to let her burn in order to record a video? That isn’t something people do in order to avoid trouble. It is something people do when they have been warped by a voyeuristic culture that turns them into spectators, and their fellow humans into mere spectacles.

The prurient onlookers who casually gazed upon the horror in the subway remind me of the crowds that used to gather to witness racist lynchings in pre-Civil Rights America, or those in 18th- and 19th-century Europe for whom executions by hanging or the guillotine were a form of entertainment. We say to ourselves that we’re more civilized now, more sensitized to the suffering of others. Debrina Kawam’s agonizing last moments say something very different.