Judge sentences New York high school senior who set homeless man on fire on subway

A high school senior who admitted to setting a sleeping homeless man on fire on the New York City subway last year has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison.

After Hiram Carrero pleaded guilty in March, Judge Lewis J. Liman gave the 19-year-old a prison term that is six months longer than the mandatory minimum for arson, but shorter than the eight-year maximum federal prosecutors asked for.

Prosecutors said in court filings that Carrero’s “heinous actions” on December 1, 2025, left the homeless man extensively scarred and disfigured, adding that he likely would have died if first responders hadn’t immediately arrived to rush him to the hospital.

Early in the morning, Carrero entered the uptown train at the 34th Street–Penn Station subway stop. Security footage captured him setting the fire and then leaving the subway car.

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The train traveled for more than two minutes before reaching the next station, during which the fire spread across the subway bench and engulfed the victim, who was seen on surveillance footage standing up before collapsing.

Police officers with the New York Police Department arrived at the 42nd Street–Times Square station and found the homeless man on the platform with flames rising from his lap, per body camera footage.

“Carrero attempted to kill a sleeping, homeless man by burning him alive and leaving him trapped on a moving subway car,” prosecutors said in their sentencing submission, adding that this crime was “separated from murder by mere chance.”

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Prosecutors did not view Carrero’s admission that he had been drinking and smoking marijuana before the attack as a sufficient mitigating factor.

Defense attorney Jennifer Brown asked for leniency by pointing out that Carrero was born with “neurodevelopmental impairment” after his mother did drugs while she was pregnant with him. Brown also said that he was abandoned at the hospital by his biological parents after he was born.

She described his teen years as a whirlwind of heavy drug use and drinking, which escalated in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic prevented him from going to school in person.

“Words are inadequate to express the profound shame and remorse that Hiram feels,” Brown wrote in a court filing. Carrero himself called his crime “senseless” and “inexplicable.”

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Carrero’s attack came roughly a year after the killing of Debrina Kawam, a sleeping subway rider who was fatally set on fire aboard an F train in Brooklyn in December 2024.

Sebastian Zapeta, a previously deported migrant from Guatemala, was arrested and indicted for Kawam’s murder. He remains in custody as he awaits trial.