A 41-year-old Florida woman was engulfed in flames at a St. Petersburg gas station after a stranger allegedly ignited the fuel nozzle with a lighter, all because the victim refused to hand over money.
Christine Sherbuk was pumping gas into her Volvo SUV at a Mobil station on 40th Avenue North on Thursday night when Eleanor Crawford, also 41, walked up and asked to borrow her phone. Sherbuk handed it over. Then Crawford asked for cash. Sherbuk said no. What happened next left her with second-degree burns on her arms and back.
Crawford allegedly pulled out a lighter and set the gas nozzle ablaze while fuel was still flowing. Flames erupted around Sherbuk and her vehicle. A nearby witness, Scotty Gamling, told the New York Post the scene looked like "a fireball."
Gamling rushed toward the burning woman, helped her into his truck, and called 911. Sherbuk was transported to Tampa General Hospital, where she was listed in serious but stable condition. Doctors expect her to survive.
St. Petersburg police arrested Crawford roughly 20 minutes after the attack. She now faces charges of attempted felony murder and two counts of arson, Fox News reported.
Crawford and Sherbuk were complete strangers. Police have identified no clear motive. But Crawford's background offers a grim clue. Officers described her criminal history as "extensive," with a record heavy on drug- and alcohol-related charges.
Assistant Police Chief Mike Kovacsev addressed the baffling nature of the crime:
"I don't know if alcohol and drugs were involved, but indicative of her history, there might've been something that diminished capacity there. Why would she even do something like this?"
Kovacsev stopped short of confirming whether Crawford was under the influence at the time. The investigation remains open.
Officers were already responding to a separate disturbance across the street from the Mobil station when the attack unfolded. Gamling himself had spotted Crawford involved in that earlier incident and had called police before the gas-station confrontation ever began. Fox13 Tampa Bay first reported the detail about the nearby police response.
Even with officers in the area, the attack happened fast. Crawford approached, made her requests, was refused, and struck the lighter in what amounted to seconds. By the time Gamling reached Sherbuk, flames had already consumed the area around the pump.
Kovacsev called the case unlike anything his department typically handles:
"It's kind of a unique case because you don't see anything like this, especially something that results in such horrific burns. Luckily they were able to get her stabilized, and she's going to make it."
The charges against Crawford, attempted felony murder and arson, carry serious prison time under Florida law. But the charges alone do not answer the question Kovacsev himself raised: why would anyone do this?
Crawford's extensive record of drug and alcohol offenses suggests a person the system encountered repeatedly without managing to keep off the streets. That a woman with that history could walk up to a stranger at a gas pump and turn a routine fill-up into a near-fatal attack is not just bizarre. It is the kind of failure that lands on real people, in this case, a woman who did nothing more provocative than decline to give a stranger her money.
Sherbuk survived. She will carry the scars. Crawford was caught in twenty minutes. Whether the system that released her onto that street corner in the first place learns anything from it is a different question entirely.
