The heartbreaking death of a woman sleeping on a Brooklyn train brought back painful memories for her still grieving mother, and left her furious that the MTA hasn't learned its lessons.
When news of the shocking subway murders reached her Arizona girlfriend, 73-year-old Vicki Goble immediately thought of her son, Garrett Goble. Goble died in 2020 when someone started a fire on the Platform 2 train he was operating.
“For me, it brought back memories of my son and what he went through working for the MTA,” Goble told The Post Friday. “I can't imagine anyone on the train just watching this guy do this and not trying to stop him.”
Garrett Goble, 36 years old; married father The father of two sons had just started working as a car driver on March 27, 2020. At that time, a career criminal loaded a shopping cart full of trash onto the 2 train and set it on fire.
Garrett Goble, a six-year veteran of the MTA, guided a burning train through a blackened subway tunnel to Harlem Station, where his heroic father evacuated more than a dozen passengers. I helped.
The man returned to retrieve his bag, but died of smoke inhalation, his mother said.
The pain and memory of her son's death forced Vicki Goble to leave Brooklyn's Flatlands neighborhood and move to Arizona in 2022, she said.
“They didn't do anything,” Vicki Goble said of the MTA. The MTA still does not provide fire extinguishers in MTA employee cabins, but she and Garrett Goble's wife, Delilah, have continued to ask the agency to provide one since his death.
“I'm angry because it's like they forgot about my son,” Vicki Goble said. “It is a shame that more is not being done to improve the fire safety of the subway for workers and passengers. Without people to use it, there would be no subway system.
“At least they could put a fire extinguisher in the conductor's cabin. It might give people a fighting chance to put out the fire. People in power tend to forget where they come from. there is.”
The MTA employee who operated the train last weekend “could have saved that woman's life had she acted.”
The woman who died in last week's subway car fire has only been described as homeless.
Guatemalan immigrant Sebastian Zapeta Khalil was arrested on suspicion of violent murder.
“It's very disappointing,” she added.
Nathaniel Abinger, who started the 2020 fire, has not yet been tried on charges of murder and arson.
An MTA spokesperson said fire extinguishers are only located “along the tracks and in station booths,” and neither area is accessible to the public.
“The MTA doesn't do anything specifically when it comes to fire protection,” said Vicki Goble. “For a city of this size, this great, this important, this system is very outdated.”
