Witnessing an Assault on a Bus Driver

An awful position we're putting front line workers in

I quit Twitter, otherwise this is probably the kind of thing I would post on Twitter. But last week I was aboard a bus where the bus driver was attacked.

I had traveled to Columbus for a work event. And I was able to get a ride there with a colleague. Since I don’t have my own car, I thought, I’ll just take Greyhound home.

Greyhound has always been really hit or miss. Even before the pandemic, there were times where I took it and it was so great and so cheap, I couldn’t believe it. But when it’s bad, it’s really bad. I have some horror stories. But this last trip was a new low.

In Columbus, they are renovating the station. And I had to trek out to this suburban highway to get to the station, which was a shuttered gas station that didn’t even have a bathroom.

Everyone who rides Greyhound usually is pretty poor, kinda down on their luck maybe. Occasionally you get the odd college student. Mostly people kinda keep to themselves.

There was one guy on this bus right from the beginning that was extremely animated and talkative. It was sorta strange. I thought it was mostly annoying at the time.

But in retrospect, I think he might have been high, or having a manic episode, or both. I later learned he told someone he had just gotten out of jail/prison that day and had been drinking.

Anyway some of the other passengers were complaining about him so after we stopped, the bus driver made him sit in one of the front seats. But he told him he wasn’t allowed to talk.

This guy just kinda ignored that and was having this wild kind of monologue in the front seat and the driver kept saying he didn’t want to talk and be quiet but the guy kept ignoring him. It was awkward as a passenger to see this guy just ignoring the bus driver’s authority and request. But what could we do? Me and another passenger tried to talk him down but he just shouted at me. I’m not a social worker. Anyway, this guy wasn’t in the mood to be reasoned with.

At a certain point he started being a little menacing. He was cursing and he accused the bus driver of being racist, which was ironic because he was white and the bus driver was Black.

We were about an hour from Cleveland and at scheduled stop in Wooster and when he stopped the guy stood up and said “are you kicking me off?” And the bus driver said “yes” and then he (the crazy guy) just went nuts and attacked him (the bus driver).

It was pretty awful to watch. I started kinda screaming and a few people were calling the cops. And eventually two male passengers broke up the fight kinda and the guy left the bus. But not before he bit this poor bus driver on the hand.

Police came and arrested the guy right away and a few of us gave testimony to the cop. And then the EMS treated him and he got back on the bus and finished his shift.

We were all just dying to get home. I really felt bad for the driver though, we all did. Getting bit by a crazy person and then having to finish your shift. I cannot. The bus driver handled it so professionally all in all. It was kind of heroic.

Anyway, obviously, I can’t know all the offender’s priors, besides my suspicions. But I wanted to write about it because these are the kinds of instances of disorder that have plagued public transit since the pandemic. I think we could do better for workers like this than just kind of dismissing these kinds of incidents as conservative propaganda.

There are a lot of people out there right now who are suffering a lot. I think one of our biggest problems in this country right now is that we don’t have an adequate system for helping people who have serious mental illness, and by that I mean schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

I don’t know for a fact that this guy was bipolar, that’s just my guess. His frame of mind coming out of prison had not set him up for success, that is for sure. There were also aspects of his sort of monologue that were a little paranoid, I would say.

If you get kicked off a bus in Wooster, Ohio, I don’t even know what you do, if you don’t have much money or family support. The New York Times recently had a big article about how in the U.S., in absence of a functional mental illness support system, we are just imprisoning tens of thousands of people with serious psychiatric disorders.

I don’t even know that I endorse every aspect of the article. It seems intent on placing blame on prison workers, who, for the most part, aren’t properly trained to treat people with serious mental illness (which would be a very hard and stressful job even with the right training.)

I’ve read some good things about the lack of support for mental illness in this country recently. About 1 percent of people in the U.S. are schizophrenic and another 1 percent are bipolar. And the reason I separate these two illnesses from other run of the mill mental health problems — like anxiety and depression — are these are the two that can cause a real loss of touch with reality.

Mental illness, this could happen to any of us. But for the grace of God. But at least if you come from a wealthy family, you can maybe get the treatment you need to avoid prison and or homelessness.

Following the pandemic we have people retreating from public spaces, like transit, like downtowns, and I think this unaddressed mental illness crisis is part of the reason. We’re just kind of discarding people. We dismantled the old system we had — mental institutions — but we never came up with an adequate replacement.

And I understand that treatment for serious mental illness is probably expensive, but so is ignoring the problem.

Using public transit, going out in public, requires a little bit of public trust. A respect for certain ground rules and courtesy. I don’t think that we can keep papering over this festering problem.