Certainly the most shocking event in recent history for lovers of public transportation was the stabbing, eventual decapitation, and apparent cannibalism of a sleeping Greyhound bus rider by his seatmate in July of last year. Most of us definitely have a false sense of security while riding the trains and buses with others, figuring that nothing will happen as long as someone's around to see it. I'm not going to let myself fall asleep on an empty G train in the middle of Brooklyn at 3 a.m., but a packed 4 train on the Upper East Side at rush hour? Not a chance someone's going to whack my head off with a butcher knife, surely. And especially not a Canadian.
In light of the ruling that the killer, Vincent Li, is mentally ill and therefore not criminally responsible for his actions, I was reading up on the case today and found this article from United Press International containing some facts that I didn't hear last summer when the story broke:
1) Up until the beheading, Greyhound had been running a campaign with ads that read, "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage." I had originally been really impressed by the PETA claim that this decapitation was pretty much the same as killing animals for food, but Greyhound's ad really takes the cake.
2) After he was arrested, Mr. Li was found to have his victim's nose, ear, and mouth parts in a plastic baggie in his pocket. We've all seen plenty of people wearing surgical masks on the trains to protect themselves from cold and flu, but I may be the first person you see with a head-to-shoulder iron mask to protect myself from beheading.
– Katie Ett, unapologeticallymundane.com
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