She wore it the way other people wear wedding rings or religious medals: without thinking, because it had become part of who she was. A plain black hoodie, soft from hundreds of washes, the white raised-fist emblem and the words BLACK LIVES MATTER slightly cracked from years of wear. Bethany Magee had bought it in the summer of 2020, the week after George Floyd was murdered, and it never really left her rotation. It was the hoodie she pulled on when she marched in Grant Park, the one she wore while designing protest posters at 3 a.m., the one she threw over her pajamas for late-night CTA rides home from the coffee shop. It was ordinary. It was hers. It was, in the end, the lastily visible thing that may have turned a stranger into an executioner.
On the night of October 14, 2025, as the Blue Line train rattled beneath downtown Chicago, 24-year-old Bethany Magee sat sketching in the corner of a half-empty car, earbuds in, hoodie up, the raised fist resting just over her heart. At 1:17 a.m., Derrick Lyle walked straight toward her. The surveillance footage is merciless: his eyes lock on the emblem for four full seconds, his jaw working as if chewing on something bitter, before he pulls a squeeze bottle of accelerant from his coat pocket and empties it over her head and torso. The lighter flicks. The flames rise so fast they look almost gentle, until the screaming starts.
Sixty percent of her body is now burned. Her hands, once nimble enough to draw entire worlds in the margins of receipts, are wrapped in layers of gauze and pressure garments. She has already endured four skin-graft surgeries and faces at least eight more. The pain, doctors say, is beyond what most people can imagine. Yet the deeper wound may be the realization that the hoodie she loved, the quiet daily declaration that Black lives matter, might have been the reason someone decided she should die.
Investigators no longer call this random.
The evidence that has emerged in the weeks since the attack is chilling in its specificity. Lyle’s seized phone and dormant social-media accounts reveal a years-long spiral into far-right message boards, QAnon Telegram channels, and private groups devoted to “stopping” Black Lives Matter by any means necessary. Posts from 2020 rage against “BLM terrorists” and share memes of burning protest signs. One message, sent to another user just three days before the attack, reads in part: “Saw another one of them on the train tonight wearing the shirt. Next time I won’t just stare.” Chicago Police and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force have quietly reclassified the incident as suspected bias-motivated violent extremism. Prosecutors are preparing hate-crime enhancements that could keep Lyle behind bars for the rest of his life.
Bethany Magee was never a loud activist. Friends describe her as the person who showed up to every march with a backpack full of water bottles and first-aid supplies, who designed beautiful protest posters for free, who listened more than she spoke. She was the white ally who understood that solidarity sometimes meant taking up less space so others could take up more. The hoodie was her way of refusing to let the moment pass, of reminding the world, every single day, that she had not forgotten. In a city where people learn to look away from discomfort, Bethany refused to look away from justice.
That refusal may have marked her.
This is not the first time a visible symbol of Black Lives Matter has provoked violence, and everyone who has paid attention knows it will not be the last. In the summer of 2020, a biracial woman in Wisconsin was doused with lighter fluid and set alight after leaving a protest. In 2021, a college student in Missouri was beaten unconscious for wearing a BLM mask on campus. In 2022, a man in Portland drove his truck into a sidewalk vigil because the participants were holding signs. The pattern is ugly, but it is unmistakable: for a certain kind of rage, the raised fist is not a plea for humanity. It is a declaration of war.
And Bethany, without ever meaning to, walked into the crosshairs wearing it across her chest.
Chicago has answered with a ferocity that feels almost primal. The GoFundMe launched by her sister has soared past $1.4 million. Murals of Bethany as a phoenix now cover entire walls in Wicker Park and Pilsen. Strangers send letters addressed simply to “The Girl in the Black Hoodie, Chicago.” Black Lives Matter Chicago has declared her an honorary member. Alicia Garza, one of the movement’s co-founders, recorded a video that has been viewed millions of times: “Bethany stood with us when it was dangerous. Now we stand with her.”
Every day, more people pull their own faded BLM hoodies out of the back of closets and wear them again, to work, to school, on the same Blue Line where Bethany burned. It is a quiet, stubborn act of defiance: if they can set one of us on fire for this symbol, they will have to set all of us on fire.
Inside Room 412 of the burn ICU at Northwestern Memorial, Bethany cannot yet hold a pencil, but she is dictating a new graphic novel panel by panel. The story is no longer about a fictional heroine. It is about a real one. She wants the final page to show the hoodie still intact, not because the flames never touched it, but because the idea it carried cannot be burned away.
Doctors say she has begun to smile again, small, crooked, painful smiles beneath the compression mask that will be part of her life for years. When a nurse recently asked if she regretted ever wearing the hoodie, Bethany thought for a long time and then answered, voice raw from the breathing tube scars: “I only regret that I won’t be able to wear it again for a while.”
