Woman arrested for subway cricket prank, says she fears for her life

The woman who showered crickets and worms into a busy D-train last week has been arrested.

Before her arrest Tuesday, Zaida Pugh, 21, posted a 37-minute video on Facebook tearfully saying that she fears for her life, and regrets the fallout of her “performance art.”

“There are people that really hate me…probably want me dead. I don’t want that. That’s not the type of attention I wanted,” Pugh, an aspiring actress, said in the video.

Pugh was apprehended by the NYPD’s Brooklyn Warrant Squad Tuesday and was charged with reckless endangerment, obstructing governmental administration, false reporting of an incident and disorderly conduct, the New York Daily News reported.

“I just really had a dream and I wanted it to go far. I wanted to spread messages out there, and I didn’t want it to happen like this,” she stated in her video.

It is unknown what she was dreaming would happen with her bizarre prank in which she posed as a woman selling crickets and worms. In a video of the Aug. 26 incident someone appears to smack the writhing bucket from her hands, flinging the live bugs onto rush-hour riders. One startled straphanger then pulled the emergency brake, leaving the entire train stranded for more than a half-hour on the Manhattan Bridge as crickets jumped about.

Pugh then acted as though she was a mentally ill, screaming uncontrollably, urinating on herself, and attempting to vomit, video of the incident reveals. When police arrived they took her to a psych ward for evaluation and then released.

Two days later Pugh said the bugs were a staged prank to raise awareness of how people treat the homeless. At the time she was not concerned about the backlash, she told Reuters.

“Of course they’ll be angry with me, but I guess I’m just doing me. I’m waking people up with my shows, my acts,” she said by telephone.