The Blue Line rattled through the Loop like any other Monday night, fluorescent lights buzzing over weary commuters scrolling their phones after a long day. At 8:42 p.m., Bethany MaGee, 26, settled into a middle seat in the third car, earbuds in, drafting an email to her boss at Caterpillar about quarterly projections. The business research analyst from Upland, Indiana – a small-town girl who’d traded cornfields for skyscrapers two years ago – had no reason to glance up when a disheveled man in a threadbare hoodie shuffled in from the back.

What happened next lasted 17 seconds. Seconds that seared 60 percent of her body, turned her golden retriever-blonde hair to ash, and ignited a firestorm over Chicago’s revolving door for violent offenders. The man, 50-year-old Lawrence Reed – a serial predator with 72 prior arrests spanning decades of assaults, robberies, and drug-fueled rages – didn’t ask for her seat. He didn’t mutter threats. He simply unscrewed the cap on a plastic bottle of gasoline, upended it over her head and shoulders in a drenching cascade, and flicked a lighter.

As flames whooshed up her back, Reed leaned in close – so close his breath singed her earlobe – and snarled, “Burn alive, bitch.” Then he watched, stone-faced, as Bethany bolted from her seat, a human torch slapping at the fire that clawed up her arms and face.

Surveillance footage, leaked to local outlets and viewed exclusively by this reporter, captures the pandemonium: Bethany stumbles toward the doors as the train screeches into Clark/Lake station, her screams muffled by the roar of igniting fuel. Fellow passengers – a mix of office workers, tourists, and night-shifters – freeze in that split-second horror, hands over mouths, before three brave souls leap into action. A burly construction worker smothers her with his jacket; a nurse from Rush University pats out embers with her scarf; a college kid douses her with the dregs of a Dasani bottle. The doors hiss open, and they bundle her onto the platform, where she collapses in a smoldering heap, skin bubbling like overboiled tar.

“I thought she was going to die right there,” the nurse, 29-year-old Elena Vasquez, tells me from her Logan Square apartment, bandaged hands trembling around a mug of chamomile. “Her eyes – God, her eyes were locked on mine, begging. She kept whispering, ‘My face, my face,’ like that was all she had left to lose.”

Bethany didn’t die. Not that night. Paramedics from Station 13 raced her to Stroger Hospital’s burn unit, sirens wailing through Michigan Avenue’s glittering canyons. There, in a sterile suite thick with the stench of charred flesh and antiseptic, surgeons grafted skin from her thighs onto her arms, peeled blisters the size of silver dollars from her cheeks, and pumped her full of morphine that couldn’t touch the deeper agony. As of Sunday evening, she remains in critical condition, intubated and sedated, her survival odds hovering at 40 percent per the latest ICU update. Her family – mom Karen, a retired schoolteacher; dad Mike, a feedlot foreman; and brother Jake, 23, who flew in from Purdue on a red-eye – huddles in a vinyl waiting room, passing around faded photos of Bethany at prom, beaming with braces and a crown of wildflowers.

“She was the light,” Karen whispers, clutching a Polaroid of her daughter cradling a tabby kitten last Christmas. “Top of her class at Indiana State, landed that Caterpillar gig on merit alone. She FaceTimed me that morning – ‘Mom, Chicago’s brutal cold, but the skyline? Magic.’ Now? She can’t even open her eyes without screaming.”

The monster who stole that light? Lawrence Reed, a ghost in the system who’s haunted Chicago’s courts since the ’90s. His rap sheet reads like a horror novel: 1998, armed robbery of a South Side bodega; 2003, aggravated battery on a transit cop; 2012, sexual assault dismissed on a technicality; 2019, meth possession with intent, probation after “good behavior.” By August 2025, he’d allegedly pistol-whipped a social worker at Cook County Jail over a denied commissary request – his 72nd collar. A “soft-touch” judge slapped him with an ankle monitor and house arrest, citing “overcrowding.” He cut it off with bolt cutters three days before the attack.

Federal prosecutors, invoking rarely used statutes, slapped Reed with terrorism charges Friday – the same playbook they dusted off after 9/11 for domestic extremists. “This wasn’t random rage,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros thundered in a packed Loop presser. “It was premeditated barbarism. Reed carried that gasoline for a reason. He targeted vulnerability – a young woman alone, head down. This is the face of unchecked recidivism.”

Reed, now 50 and sporting singed eyebrows and a bandaged right hand from blowback flames, smirked through his arraignment via video from the Metropolitan Correctional Center. “She looked at me funny,” he allegedly muttered to his public defender, a fresh-faced ACLU recruit who’s already filed for bail reduction. No remorse. No tears. Just the hollow stare of a man who’s gamed the gears of justice for decades.

The city? It’s erupting. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy – a Trump-era holdover with a Fox News Rolodex – blasted the Lightfoot-era “bail reform” on X: “72 prior arrests, but he was free to set 26-year-old Bethany MaGee on fire. Chicago’s bleeding out from its own soft heart.” Hashtags like #JusticeForBethany and #LockThemUp surged past 5 million posts by midnight, blending grief-stricken GoFundMe shares ($240,000 raised in 72 hours for her medical bills) with fury-fueled memes of revolving cell doors. Aldermen from the 42nd Ward are demanding emergency sessions; the CTA’s slashing Blue Line patrols by a third overnight, arming conductors with pepper spray. Even Mayor Brandon Johnson, usually a progressive bulwark, choked up at a vigil: “This evil pierces us all. We failed her.”

Bethany’s friends paint a portrait of quiet steel wrapped in Midwestern warmth. “She volunteered at PAWS Chicago every weekend,” says roommate Lila Torres, 27, a graphic designer who found Bethany’s cat, Whiskers, pacing the empty Wicker Park apartment when she didn’t come home. “Adopted him from a hoarding case last spring. Said, ‘Every stray deserves a shot.’ Now she’s the stray, fighting for scraps of skin to call her own.” At work, colleagues remember her poring over spreadsheets till 7 p.m., then sneaking out for rooftop yoga at Lincoln Park. “She’d text me puppy videos at 2 a.m.,” Jake adds, voice cracking. “Now her phone’s silent.”

As Reed rots in federal lockup – facing life if convicted on the terror count – whispers swirl of deeper rot. ATF agents raided his Englewood flophouse Tuesday, unearthing Molotov recipes scrawled on Big Lots receipts and a manifesto ranting against “uppity white girls on trains.” Was Bethany random, or a symbol? The affidavit hints at the latter: Reed paced the platform for 14 minutes pre-boarding, bottle in hand, muttering to shadows.

For now, Stroger’s burn ward hums with the beep of monitors and the hush of prayers. A nurse slips a stuffed bear into Bethany’s bandaged grip – Whiskers the Second, courtesy of the firehouse crew. Outside, protesters chain themselves to Blue Line poles, chanting her name like a war cry. And in Upland, a makeshift memorial blooms on the family porch: daisies, candles, a sign reading “Burn Bright, Beth.”

She survived the match. The bottle. The bile. But Chicago’s inferno? That’s the blaze that might finally force change – if it doesn’t consume them all first.

Bethany MaGee, the girl who chased dreams down steel tracks, now fights from a web of tubes and grafts. Her next breath? A middle finger to the monster who tried to snuff it. And to a city that let him light the fuse.