The torching dying of a lady sleeping on a Brooklyn prepare has stirred up painful recollections for a still- grieving mom — and left her outraged that the MTA hasn’t discovered its lesson.
When information of the stunning subway killing reached her in Arizona, Vicki Goble, 73, instantly considered her son, Garrett Goble, who died in 2020 when somebody began a fireplace on a No. 2 prepare he was working.
“For me, there have been shades of remembering my son and what he went by working for the MTA,” Goble instructed The Submit Friday. “I simply can’t think about there have been folks on the prepare that simply watched this man do that, and did nothing to attempt to cease him.”
Garret Goble, 36, a married father of two sons, had simply began his shift as a motorman on March 27, 2020, when a profession felony loaded a trash-filled purchasing cart onto the two Practice — and set it ablaze.
A six-year MTA veteran, Garrett Goble navigated the blazing prepare by the blackened subway tunnels to a Harlem station, the place the hero dad helped evacuate greater than a dozen passengers.
He returned for his bag however died from smoke inhalation, his mom mentioned.
The ache and reminiscence of her son’s dying pressured Vicki Goble to depart Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood in 2022 for Arizona, she mentioned.
“They did nothing,” Vicki Goble mentioned of the MTA, which nonetheless doesn’t present MTA employees with fireplace extinguishers of their cabins — one thing she and Garrett Goble’s spouse, Delilah, have been calling on the company to do since his dying.
“I’m mad, as a result of it’s like they forgot about my son,” Vicki Goble mentioned. “It’s a disgrace that extra issues haven’t been achieved to enhance fireplace security on the subways, for the employees and the riders. They wanna do all this modernization of the stations, however with out the employees and individuals who use it, you gained’t have a subway system.
“They might at the least put a fireplace extinguisher within the cabins of the conductors. That may give folks a combating likelihood to place out a fireplace. The folks which might be in energy are likely to neglect the place they got here from.”
The MTA employee working final weekend’s prepare could have been ready “to save lots of that girl if that they had acted.”
The lady killed in final week’s subway automotive fireplace has solely been described as homeless.
Guatemalan migrant Sebastian Zapeta-Calil has been arrested for the heinous homicide.
“I’m very upset,” she added.
Nathaniel Avinger, the person who began the 2020 fireplace, has but to face trial on homicide and arson fees.
An MTA spokesperson mentioned fireplace extinguishers are solely “stored alongside the tracks and inside the cubicles at stations” — each areas the general public can not entry.
“The MTA isn’t doing something, particularly with fireplace security,” Vicki Goble mentioned. “The system is so antiquated for a metropolis this measurement, this nice and this necessary.”
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