The horrific murder of a woman on the New York City subway, by involuntary immolation at the hands of an illegal migrant, has shocked the nation while going almost unreported on the “legacy” networks. Today NBC Nightly News broke the ice, leaving ABC Whirled News Tonight as the lone network holdout.

Watch the report in its entirety below:

NBC NIGHTLY NEWS

12/23/24

6:40 PM

LESTER HOLT: Also in New York, a suspect was arrested after a disturbing attack on a subway over the weekend. Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, a 33-year-old undocumented migrant from Guatemala, is accused of lighting a sleeping woman on fire on the train. An ICE spokesperson says the suspect was previously deported in 2018, but managed to get past immigration officials again.

CBS Weekend News, to their credit, was the first network newscast to report on the murder, but had omitted important details regarding the suspect’s immigration record. Although NBC’s report is essentially a brief, shorter in duration than CBS’s item, it provides viewers with more of the full picture painted by this awful story.

Illegal migrant crime was already an inconvenient story within the current environment, but this particular illegal migrant crime is so heinous that it threatens to stand in the public memory as the bookend to President Joe Biden’s border policy. 

Perhaps this might explain why ABC, the most routinely pro-Biden/Harris network out there, has yet to report on this horrendous murder. There isn’t much in the way of advocacy that ABC could do in this instance, so it’s better to simply pretend the story doesn’t exist at all.

That might work within the cloistered confines of the ABC newsroom but not in the real world, where the public is well aware of the horrors of an open border. 

We will continue to monitor news media coverage of this awful story as it develops.