A 60-year-old man was stabbed aboard an Amtrak bus as it approached Los Angeles Union Station, and a fellow rider’s quick improvisation with his own sweater may have kept the victim alive long enough for help to arrive. The attack happened on a bus traveling from Bakersfield to Tijuana, and the victim was taken to a hospital in unknown condition.
Passenger Keith Metcalf told NBC Los Angeles he heard loud noises on the bus before realizing a woman was threatening other riders with a medium-sized curved knife. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the woman stabbed the 60-year-old passenger, and officers responded to a reported stabbing just before 3:15 p.m. Metcalf said he thought the man was going to die, and that the moment affected him in ways he didn’t expect.
A Sweater Tourniquet and a Scramble to Safety
With the victim bleeding, Metcalf used his own sweater as a makeshift tourniquet around the man’s arm, an intervention that lines up with guidance from the American College of Surgeons’ Stop the Bleed program, which warns that uncontrolled severe arterial bleeding is the leading cause of preventable trauma death and can turn fatal in as little as three minutes. As the chaos unfolded, another man aboard the bus yelled for passengers to move to the front, away from the woman and the knife, Metcalf recounted.
Fellow passengers then intervened to stop the attack and restrained the suspected attacker, per Metcalf’s account. No other passengers were hurt. When the bus came to a stop, LAPD took the suspected attacker into custody. The stabbing victim survived. NBC Los Angeles reported that Amtrak did not respond to requests for comment on the incident.
The Route and the Wider Safety Picture
The bus was part of Amtrak’s Thruway motorcoach network, which runs scheduled, guaranteed connections between non-rail locations and passenger trains — including dedicated routes linking the San Joaquin and Gold Runner rail lines in Bakersfield to Downtown LA’s Union Station, according to background compiled on Wikipedia. Security around Union Station itself is a patchwork effort, with jurisdiction shared among the LAPD Transit Services Bureau, the Amtrak Police Department and Metro Transit Enforcement, as detailed by the Policing Institute…