The torching death of a woman sleeping on a Brooklyn train has stirred up painful memories for a still- grieving mother — and left her outraged that the MTA hasn’t learned its lesson.
When news of the shocking subway killing reached her in Arizona, Vicki Goble, 73, immediately thought about her son, Garrett Goble, who died in 2020 when someone started a fire on a No. 2 train he was operating.
“For me, there were shades of remembering my son and what he went through working for the MTA,” Goble told The Post Friday. “I just can’t imagine there were people on the train that just watched this guy do this, and did nothing to try to stop him.”
Garret Goble, 36, a married father of two sons, had just started his shift as a motorman on March 27, 2020, when a career criminal loaded a trash-filled shopping cart onto the 2 Train — and set it ablaze.
A six-year MTA veteran, Garrett Goble navigated the blazing train through the blackened subway tunnels to a Harlem station, where the hero dad helped evacuate more than a dozen passengers.
He returned for his bag but died from smoke inhalation, his mother said.
The pain and memory of her son’s death forced Vicki Goble to leave Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood in 2022 for Arizona, she said.
“They did nothing,” Vicki Goble said of the MTA, which still does not provide MTA workers with fire extinguishers in their cabins — something she and Garrett Goble’s wife, Delilah, have been calling on the agency to do since his death.
“I’m mad, because it’s like they forgot about my son,” Vicki Goble said. “It’s a shame that more things haven’t been done to improve fire safety on the subways, for the workers and the riders. They wanna do all this modernization of the stations, but without the workers and people who use it, you won’t have a subway system.
“They could at least put a fire extinguisher in the cabins of the conductors. That might give people a fighting chance to put out a fire. The people that are in power tend to forget where they came from.”
The MTA worker operating last weekend’s train may have been able “to save that woman if they had acted.”
The woman killed in last week’s subway car fire has only been described as homeless.
Guatemalan migrant Sebastian Zapeta-Calil has been arrested for the heinous murder.
“I am very disappointed,” she added.
Nathaniel Avinger, the man who started the 2020 fire, has yet to stand trial on murder and arson charges.
An MTA spokesperson said fire extinguishers are only “kept along the tracks and within the booths at stations” — both areas the public cannot access.
“The MTA isn’t doing anything, especially with fire safety,” Vicki Goble said. “The system is so antiquated for a city this size, this great and this important.”
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