Passengers on a train near Philadelphia watched as a woman was raped on Wednesday night but did nothing to help or even call 911, police say. The woman was assaulted at around 11 p.m. while riding the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority Market–Frankford line. The assault began when a man, who has been identified as Fiston Ngoy, sat down next to the woman and tried to strike up a conversation. He eventually got aggressive and tried to touch her a few times. The woman pushed him away and tried to prevent him from touching her again. “Then, unfortunately, he proceeded to rip her clothes off,” Andrew Busch, a SEPTA spokesman, said.
The assault went on for around eight minutes. And throughout that entire time, none of the passengers in the train car did anything. “Anybody that was on that train has to look in the mirror and ask why they didn’t intervene or why they didn’t do something,” Timothy Bernhardt, the superintendent of the Upper Darby Township Police Department, said. It was only when a SEPTA employee saw what was going on that 911 was called and officers immediately responded and were able to catch the suspect in the act. “If somebody who witnessed this had called 911, it’s possible that we would have been able to intervene even sooner,” Busch said. Officials haven’t detailed how many other passengers there were in the train car at the time. Bernhardt said there were not “dozens of people” but there were enough that “collectively, they could have gotten together and done something.”
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