A 40-year-old man is in custody in Manitoba after a young man was stabbed — and, witnesses said, decapitated — aboard a Greyhound bus travelling through the province overnight.
Police officers spent Thursday examining a Greyhound bus where a passenger was reportedly stabbed and decapitated late Wednesday. (CBC)The RCMP would not confirm the reports of beheading, saying only that a stabbing took place around 8:30 p.m. CT on an eastbound Greyhound bus on the Trans-Canada Highway about 20 kilometres west of Portage la Prairie.
The suspect, believed to be from outside Manitoba, was arrested early Thursday morning after a standoff lasting several hours and remains in RCMP custody .
Charges have not yet been laid, and the suspect has not yet been interviewed, said RCMP spokesman Staff Sgt. Steve Colwell, adding that he could release no further information on the investigation.
The RCMP declined to identify either the suspect or the victim.
Thirty-seven people were aboard the bus en route to Winnipeg from Edmonton.
Colwell said the “brave” behaviour of the passengers and driver probably prevented anyone else from being hurt.
“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.”
Victim ‘just a kid’: witness
Passenger Cody Olmstead, 21, told CBC News he had smoked a cigarette earlier in the trip with the victim, whom he described as a man in his late teens or early 20s. The victim got on the bus in Edmonton, he said.
“I never took the time to know him, but he seemed to be OK, right, just a kid,” said Olmstead, a Nova Scotia man who had been taking the bus from Alberta to Montreal.
“He just said he was going to Winnipeg … going home, that’s where he was from.”
Garnet Caton said he heard a ‘blood-curdling scream’ and turned around to see a man repeatedly stabbing the passenger sitting next to him. (CBC)
Garnet Caton, who was sitting in the seat in front of the victim, said he saw the attacker stab his seatmate, a young man sleeping with his headphones on.
Caton said he heard a “blood-curdling scream” and turned around to see the attacker holding a large “Rambo” hunting knife above the victim, “continually stabbing him in the chest area.”
“He must have stabbed him 50 times or 60 times,” said Caton.
“Like, just everywhere, arms, legs, neck, chest, guts, wherever he could swing it, he got it,” said Olmstead.
“It looked kind of like a scuffle or an argument, you know, and then somebody’s, like, ‘Knife! Knife! Run!’ so I was running up the alleyway, slapping people telling them to get going, move, get off the bus. I got pushed over, some lady got pushed over, I was just making sure everybody was OK, and we all got off the bus,” said Olmstead
As panicked passengers fled the bus, “the attacker was over top of the victim … continually cutting him. I think the victim was gone at that point,” Caton said.
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