You’re 15. You finish your shift at the downtown restaurant where you work, so you head to the bus stop to get a ride home. It’s 11 o’clock at night. Then two guys walk up to you at the bus stop and start causing shit. They ask for your phone, and when you don’t give it up one of the guys grabs you, holding you for the other one to hit with a piece of plastic pipe. A knife comes out, and you’re getting stabbed in the gut. But before they can kill you, a bus finally arrives. Are you saved?
Not necessarily. When an attack like this happened last March, the bus pulled away without interfering. The 15-year-old, seeing his hopes for escape escaping, slipped away from his attackers and caught up to the bus. He eventually made it to a hospital, where he was treated for stab wounds and collapsed lungs.
“Had I not ran as fast and as hard as I did to catch that bus, I can honestly say I don’t think I would be here today,” the victim says in today’s Herald. The Herald did the story because one of the attackers was in court last week for sentencing. According to the piece, “The judge described the assault as ‘chilling’ and said incidents like this make everyone feel ‘less safe and less secure on the streets of the city.'” There’s no word on how less safe and less secure the judge feels knowing that buses are driving away from crimes happening right in front of them.
This article appears in Jan 14-20, 2010.
This isn’t a news piece, it is speculation based on a single comment.
The bus driver had an onus to call 911 and wait if they were too afraid to step in. This driver should be criminally charged for failing to report a crime in progress. I have no issue with being afraid to open the bus doors in case others would be in danger but to leave the scene of a crime is absolutely a disgrace.