Nine seconds. That’s all it took for Bethany MaGee’s life to change forever.
The federal courtroom in Chicago’s Dirksen Building fell dead silent on November 21, 2025, when the lights dimmed and the surveillance footage began to roll. No one in the gallery moved. Even the reporters stopped typing. What they were about to see wasn’t just evidence; it was the purest form of nightmare caught on camera.
The video is timestamped 21:24:11 on November 17. The Blue Line train is pulling out of Clark/Lake station, fluorescent lights flickering overhead. The car is moderately crowded (typical Tuesday night crowd). Commuters stare at phones, sway with the motion, lost in their own worlds.
At the far end of the frame, a man in a gray hoodie boards alone. Lawrence Reed, 50, face partially obscured by a baseball cap, hands buried in his pockets. In his right hand, hidden from every passenger, is a clear plastic bottle filled with gasoline and stuffed with a rag. The rag is already on fire. A small, steady flame dances at the neck of the bottle like a candle on a birthday cake from hell.
21:24:13 – Reed pauses, scans the car with the casual indifference of a man choosing a seat on a bus. His eyes land on the back of a young woman sitting alone, three rows up, facing forward. Hoodie up. Earbuds glowing blue. Oblivious.
That woman is Bethany MaGee, 26.
21:24:15 – Reed begins walking. Not fast. Not slow. Just deliberate. The flame in his hand flickers with every step, throwing tiny orange reflections onto the metal poles.
21:24:17 – He is directly behind her now. The camera angle perfectly captures the top of Bethany’s head, the loose strands of hair escaping her hood. She never turns. Never senses the heat.
21:24:18 – Reed raises the bottle.
21:24:19 – He pours.
The gasoline cascades over her head in a single, practiced motion, soaking her hair, her hoodie, running down her neck. For one frozen frame she still doesn’t know. Then the rag touches fabric.
21:24:20 – Ignition.
The fireball is instantaneous. A bright orange bloom engulfs Bethany’s entire upper body. Her silhouette vanishes inside a roaring column of flame. The sound, captured on the train’s audio, is blood-curdling: a high, animal scream that doesn’t even sound human.
Bethany leaps from her seat, arms flailing, beating at her own face as the fire eats her skin. Passengers scatter in every direction. Someone yells “Fire!” Someone else screams “Stop the train!” Bethany stumbles down the aisle, a living torch, leaving a trail of burning droplets on the floor. The train lurches into the next station. Doors open. She collapses onto the platform, rolling, trying to smother the flames against the concrete while strangers rip off jackets and beat at her body.
Reed? He simply steps off the train behind her, hands now empty, and walks away into the crowd as calmly as if he’d just finished a phone call.
The entire sequence, from the moment he raises the bottle to the moment he disappears up the escalator, lasts nine seconds.
Prosecutors froze the video at 21:24:19 – the exact instant Bethany’s world ended – and zoomed in on Reed’s face. Cold. Expressionless. The eyes of a man who had done this before or had at least rehearsed it in his head a thousand times.
Bethany’s family sat in the front row and watched their daughter burn on a 60-inch screen. Her mother Emily had to be helped from the courtroom, sobbing so hard she couldn’t breathe. Her father Greg stared straight ahead, fists clenched so tight his knuckles went white, repeating under his breath, “She never even saw him. She never even saw him coming.”
The video has not been released to the public – federal judges rarely allow that kind of trauma to go viral – but leaked stills are everywhere. On X, on Reddit, on TikTok, the nine-second clip is dissected frame by frame. True-crime creators slow it down, enhance it, overlay it with sad piano music. #BethanyMaGee has 400 million views and counting.
And every single person who watches it asks the same question: How does a man with seventy-two prior arrests, out on bond, wearing an ankle monitor that was screaming curfew violations for hours, end up holding a lit Molotov cocktail on a Chicago train at 9:24 p.m. on a random Tuesday?
The answer, so far, is silence from the monitoring company, silence from the Cook County courts that kept cutting him loose, and silence from a system that treated Lawrence Reed like a nuisance instead of a walking apocalypse.
Bethany remains in the burn unit, sedated, wrapped in gauze, breathing through a ventilator. Doctors say if she survives the next round of surgeries, the road back will be measured in years, not months. Skin grafts. Physical therapy. Psychological care that may never be enough.
Her family finally released her name and first photo on November 25 – a smiling selfie with her dog, taken weeks before the attack. The GoFundMe titled “Help Bethany Heal” shattered $500,000 in under 72 hours. Strangers leave messages like “I watched the video and I can’t sleep” and “I take the Blue Line every day and I’m terrified.”
Lawrence Reed sits in federal lockup, charged with domestic terrorism, attempted murder, and arson. Prosecutors say they will seek life without parole. His public defender has already signaled an insanity plea.
But no plea, no sentence, no punishment will ever erase those nine seconds.
Nine seconds when a young woman with her whole life ahead of her sat peacefully on a train, earbuds in, scrolling through memes, while pure evil lit a fuse behind her back.
Nine seconds that turned Bethany MaGee into a symbol of everything broken, and everything that still might be saved if we finally start listening to the alarms we’ve been ignoring for far too long.
