Md. man arrested in Greyhound bus shooting
Woman killed, 5 people wounded, 2 critically
LOS ANGELES – A gunman who killed a woman and wounded five other people on a Greyhound bus in Southern California was cursing and muttering incoherently before the attack, passengers and authorities said.
Investigators are trying to determine a motive for the apparently random assault Monday that left two people in critical condition.
Anthony Devonte Williams, 33, of Capitol Heights, Maryland, was arrested after passengers disarmed him and got him off the bus, California Highway Patrol Sgt. Brian Pennings said.
“There’s no indication that he knew anybody on there,” Pennings said.
Williams was booked at the Kern County jail Monday evening on suspicion of murder and attempted murder and was held without bail.
The packed bus was heading from Los Angeles to San Francisco when shots were fired at about 1:30 a.m. Monday on Interstate 5 near the small mountain community of Lebec, about 70 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
The driver and 42 passengers were aboard, including 6- and 8-year-old children. They were not hurt.
Passenger Mark Grabban, 29, told the Associated Press the gunman had been sitting with his leg sticking out into the aisle, muttering to himself.
“He was just saying weird stuff like ‘you don’t know me like that,’ ‘wait til we get to the station,’ ‘get away from the dude in the striped shirt,’” Grabban said in a series of Instagram messages.
Suddenly the man started cursing and shooting, Grabban said. Grabban hid beneath the seat in front of him. He said the gunman fired eight or nine shots that “seemed to go on forever.” He added: “I was waiting for one to hit me.”
“I thought I was shot because I felt a rush of heat on the back of my head as I went down,” he said. “But I guess I just smashed my head on the seat as I went down to the floor.”
Then, silence fell. The injured passengers began moaning, and others started panicking.
The driver had pulled to the shoulder of the freeway, where authorities said some passengers managed to get the man off the bus.
“Due to some very heroic acts by the passengers, they were able to overcome this subject and disarm him,” California Highway Patrol Sgt. Brian Pennings said.
The gun, a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, and several ammo magazines were found in the bus, Pennings said.
Grabban, who was sitting near the back of the bus with his girlfriend, said he had picked up the gun’s empty magazine clip and handed it to the driver. A casing ended up on Grabban’s lap, and he noticed a bullet hole in the floor next to him.
“I saw the blood on the floor of the aisle,” Grabban told NBC News. “I looked to the woman on the left, and she wasn’t responding, wasn’t moving or anything. She was lifeless.”
The dead passenger was a 51-yearold woman from Colombia, based on her passport, but her name wasn’t immediately released, Pennings said.