PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, Manitoba // A man on a Greyhound bus travelling across Canada stabbed a fellow passenger dozens of times before decapitating him. Garnet Caton, a passenger on the bus, said the victim was sleeping with his headphones on when he was stabbed 40 or 50 times by the man sitting next to him. A 40-year-old man was arrested for the murder on Wednesday night, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Sgt Steve Colwell told a news conference.
Police apprehended the man when he broke a window and tried to escape from the bus, which was travelling from Edmonton, Alberta, to Winnipeg, Manitoba. "We heard this bloodcurdling scream and turned around, and the guy was standing up, stabbing this guy repeatedly, like 40 or 50 times," Mr Caton said from a hotel in Brandon, Manitoba, where he and other passengers had been taken to rest. Mr Colwell said they didn't know what prompted the attack and said they had not yet interviewed the man as of yesterday afternoon.
Passengers said the attacker did not appear to know the victim, who was thought to be about 19 years old, and that he wore sunglasses throughout the attack. Mr Caton said the bus stopped and the passengers scrambled to get off while the suspect allegedly began carving up the man's body. He said the attacker severed the man's head severed the man's head with a large hunting knife and held the head up by the door for others to see.
"When he was attacking him, he was calm ... like he was at the beach," Mr Caton said. "There was no rage or, or anything. He was just like a robot stabbing the guy." Mr Caton said that the attacker eventually tried to get off the bus, but that he, the driver and a passing trucker who had stopped to help, threw their weight against the door to prevent the man from leaving. Cody Olmstead, a fellow passenger, said the man "dropped the head and went back and started cutting the body back up". Mr Olmstead said the man later taunted police, who had surrounded the bus, and dropped the head in front of them. The Greyhound spokesman, Abby Wambaugh, said 37 passengers and one driver were on the bus. The victim had been on the bus since Edmonton. Mr Caton said the attacker boarded the bus around Brandon, Manitoba, about 130 kilometres west of Portage La Prairie, a town in the heart of the Canadian Prairies. He said: "He sat in the front at first, everything was normal. We went to the next stop and he got off and had a smoke with another young lady there. When he got on the bus again, he came to the back near where I was sitting. He put his bags in the overhead compartment. He didn't say a word to anybody. He seemed totally normal. About a half an hour later, we heard this bloodcurdling scream." Mr Colwell, the RCMP spokesman, praised the passengers for their behaviour. "It's not something that happens regularly on a bus," he said. "You're sitting there enjoying your trip and then all of a sudden somebody gets stabbed. I imagine it would be pretty traumatic ... the way they acted was extraordinary." Mr Colwell added that "they reacted swiftly, calmly in exiting the bus and, as a result, nobody else was injured." The public safety minister Stockwell Day called it a "horrific' incident, but did not discuss details of the attack, saying he did not want to jeopardize the investigation. "We want to make sure that the process is followed as aggressively as possible, a full legal process, and the perpetrator is definitely dealt with the full force of the law," he said. "The horrific nature of it is probably one-of-a-kind in Canadian history." * AP
