It was just another Tuesday night on the CTA Blue Line.

Bethany MaGee, 26, gamer girl, animal lover, the kind of person who still played board games with her brothers on weekends, was riding home from downtown Chicago. She had her earbuds in, hoodie up, scrolling TikTok like thousands of other twenty-somethings on the train that night of November 17, 2025. The car was half-full. People stared at phones. Nobody looked twice at the man in the dirty gray sweatshirt who boarded at Clark/Lake with something bulging in his jacket pocket.

His name is Lawrence Reed. Fifty years old. And according to Cook County court records, he had been arrested seventy-two times before that night. Seventy-two. Assault. Robbery. Theft. Domestic battery. Criminal trespass. The rap sheet reads like a phone book of Chicago’s broken justice system. At the exact moment he stepped onto Bethany’s train, he was out on bond for yet another felony case, wearing an electronic ankle monitor that was supposed to keep him inside his apartment after 6 p.m.

It was 9:24 p.m.

Surveillance video, released in federal court on November 21, is only nine seconds long but it will haunt the city forever.

Reed walks down the aisle with the casual swagger of a man who has done this before. In his right hand is a clear plastic bottle filled with gasoline and stuffed with a rag, already lit. The flame dances orange against the fluorescent lights. Bethany never sees him. She’s facing forward, earbuds glowing blue, completely unaware that the man who has beaten the system seventy-two times is now standing directly behind her.

Second four: Reed raises the bottle.

Second six: He pours the gasoline over her head like he’s watering a plant.

Second eight: The rag touches her hood. The flames explode upward in a whoosh that turns her into a human torch.

The screams are immediate. Bethany leaps from her seat, beating at the fire eating her face, her hair, her arms. The train lurches into the next station. Doors open. She stumbles onto the platform, a living fireball, collapsing in front of stunned commuters who rip off jackets and try to smother the flames. Someone finds a fire extinguisher. Someone else dials 911. Reed? He simply walks off the train, hands in his pockets, and melts into the Loop crowd like nothing happened.

By the time Chicago police caught him thirty-six hours later, Bethany MaGee was fighting for her life at Stroger Hospital with second- and third-degree burns over sixty percent of her body. Her family says she has already undergone multiple skin grafts and faces years of surgeries. The girl who once live-streamed cozy board-game nights now lies wrapped in bandages, breathing through a tube, unable to speak.

And the man who turned her into a human torch? He was exactly where the ankle monitor said he shouldn’t be.

Court records show Reed’s monitor pinged a curfew violation at 6:03 p.m. that night. Then again at 7:12. Then again at 8:49. Each alarm went to a monitoring center that did… nothing. No patrol dispatched. No warrant issued. Just another beep in a system that has come to treat violent recidivism as background noise.

When federal prosecutors hit Reed with domestic-terrorism charges on November 20, the courtroom gallery gasped at the number: seventy-two prior arrests. The prosecutor didn’t mince words: “This defendant is a walking advertisement for everything wrong with Cook County’s catch-and-release revolving door.”

Reed’s public defender argued the ankle monitor was “just a piece of plastic” and his client “needed mental-health services, not prison.” The judge’s response was ice-cold: “He needed to be in a cage. Instead he was on a train pouring gasoline on an innocent young woman.”

Outside the courthouse, Bethany’s father Greg MaGee stood with his sons and read a statement that broke grown men: “Our daughter was simply riding the train home. She didn’t know this man. She’d never hurt anyone. She loved animals, board games, making people laugh. Now she can’t even open her eyes without excruciating pain because a man with seventy-two arrests decided to play God with a match.”

The family launched a GoFundMe the next day. Within 48 hours it had raised over $400,000 from strangers who saw the video, read the rap sheet, and felt something in America snap.

Chicago’s Blue Line has always had its dangers, but this was different. This was a daylight-bright reminder that the system designed to protect people had instead delivered a human Molotov cocktail straight to Bethany MaGee’s seat.

Lawrence Reed sits in federal custody now, facing life without parole if convicted on the terrorism count. His ankle monitor has finally been removed, because the only place he’s going is a concrete box.

And somewhere in a burn unit, a 26-year-old woman who just wanted to get home is learning how to breathe again, one agonizing inhale at a time, while the city that failed her argues over whose fault it is that a man with seventy-two arrests was ever free to strike the match.

Bethany MaGee didn’t know Lawrence Reed’s name on November 17. Now the entire country does. And none of us will ever forget it.