Man beheaded on Greyhound
Updated: July 31 at 08:09 AM CDT
BRANDON - Thirty-six passengers of a Greyhound bus travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg Thursday night watched in horror as a fellow passenger stabbed another man sleeping next to him, eventually decapitating him and waving the man’s severed head.
“He didn’t do anything to provoke the guy. They guy just took a knife out and stabbed him, started stabbing him like crazy and cut his head off,” said Garnet Caton, 36, a passenger.
The bus made an emergency stop, and passengers fled in terror onto the Trans-Canada Highway while the bus’s driver and a driver of a nearby truck shut the crazed man inside the bus with the victim. Passengers say they stood outside the bus and watched through the window, horrified, as the man disfigured the victim’s body.
By 10:30 p.m. the eastbound bus was stopped on the highway about 10 kilometres east of Portage La Prairie, surrounded by RCMP cruisers./p> Caton and others said once they escaped, they prevented the attacker from getting off the bus by threatening him with makeshift weapons like a hammer and a metal bar.
“We were telling him, ‘Stay put, stay put, stay there, don’t try to come out!’ He tried to get the bus working and the bus driver disabled the bus somehow in the back, I’m not sure how he did it, and at that point, I think the police showed up,” he said, adding officers rushed the passengers away.
“Some people were puking, some people were crying, other people were in shock ... everybody was running, screaming off the bus.”
Caton described the man who attacked the passenger as about six feet tall, 200 pounds, with a bald head and wearing sunglasses. He seemed oblivious to others when the stabbing occurred, said Caton.
Caton said the victim boarded in Edmonton, was aboriginal in appearance, was wearing hip-hop clothing, and appeared to be about 20 years of age.
“When we saw the head, we knew he was dead,” he said. “I don’t think the guy knew him at all. I think he was really crazy... the poor guy, he didn’t see it coming.”
Two yellow school buses were brought in to the closed-off stretch of highway near MacGregor for passengers to sit in while the stand-off between officers and the man inside the bus proceeded for hours.
Caton said the attacker was only on the bus for a brief period of time, after boarding in western Manitoba.
The passengers were later taken to Brandon to be interviewed by police and to stay overnight at a hotel there.
Crisis counsellors were also at the hotel to provide support to the passengers, and counsellors could be seen chatting with them outside the hotel as groups went out to local stores for snacks or to smoke cigarettes.
One small boy, who was with an adult man and woman, was given a plush teddy bear by a crisis health worker.
Another young man from Nova Scotia sat outside the Brandon hotel smoking around 3 a.m. Visibly shaken, he said RCMP had taken 36 witnesses in for questioning. He said later: “I felt bad that all the young people and old people had to see that.”
The man, who did not want his name used, said the victim of the stabbing had been sleeping before the attack.
Other passengers said that the two men were sitting in the rear of the bus and the stabbing victim was listening to music through his headphones. The attack appeared to be unprovoked.
“The first thing I heard was something like a terrible type (of) yowl and that was from the guy who got stabbed,” said an elderly woman from Winnipeg who was on the bus.
The woman and her adult daughter said they were three or four rows in front of the suspect when the attack began.
“(My daughter said) ‘Oh my God’ and everybody else started screaming,” she said. “They had terror in their eyes.”
Passengers said there was a rush of people towards the front of the bus to get off.
An RCMP spokesman could not be reached early today to confirm whether the man was taken into custody.
Two other passengers on the bus, a 22-year-old man and 21-year-old woman, from France, said they were heading to Winnipeg after visiting the woman’s father in Whitehorse. The 22-year-old man said in French that he saw a man holding a long kitchen knife repeatedly stab another passenger. He and his girlfriend said they were shocked by the attack, and the isolation in the middle of the prairies when it occurred.
“There was nowhere to go,” she said.
Man beheaded on Greyhound after other passengers left him for dead
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