Exclusive | Meet the teen heroes who turned firebug Sebastian Zapeta-Calil over to cops: Really surreal
Three Brooklyn teens boarded an F train last month with hopes of carrying their basketball team to victory — and they wound up bringing a dangerous criminal suspect to justice.Christos Strieder and his pals, Kingson and Navid, made the fateful 911 call on Dec.22 that landed sick firebug Sebastian Zapeta-Calil behind bars for allegedly torching a sleeping homeless woman to death on the same train line earlier that day.The 14-year-olds had only learned about the heinous crime a mere five minutes earlier as a warning from one of their mothers — and they were shocked to actually run into him out of the millions of people in the transit system.“It was that big of a coincidence to the point where I felt like I was dreaming — like it wasn’t even real.
Things happen in the world, but you don’t actually feel like it’s going to happen to you,” Kingson recalled in an exclusive interview with The Post.“It just felt really surreal to me.I didn’t really think anything of it at first.
But then once I actually got home and started thinking about it, everything really started to set in that that really happened.”The friends, all freshmen at Millennium Brooklyn High School, had hopped on the F train at 7th Avenue that Sunday as they headed to a junior varsity basketball game in Queens.Having just read the article sent by Navid’s mother about the tragic arson murder, the picture of the suspected firebug was fresh in their mind when Christos noticed an otherwise non-descript man sleeping in the train car.“We walked onto the train and we were joking like, ‘He’s going to be on this train’ and then we walk on and I see him,” said Christos, who lives in Kensington.“They didn’t believe me at first because they thought I was joking.But then after a couple of minutes, they also looked at him and then they realized, ‘okay, that’s actually him’ .
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The tone got a little bit more serious.”Zapeta-Calil was wearing the same black hoodie and gray s...