Photo by Flickr user transguyjay
An 11-year-old boy was stabbed on his first solo Muni ride on Tuesday evening ”by an apparently homeless man in an unprovoked attack while riding home from school,” Matier and Ross reports in SFGate. This story stopped me in my tracks – I’m sure this is every parent’s nightmare, and it happened on the 49, which I take more than any other line.
The boy had been in the intensive care unit at SF General for stabbing wounds to his liver and stomach, but he’s since been listed in good condition, SFGate reports.
More from Bay City News via SFAppeal:
The boy was riding home alone from baseball practice after school at the time, police spokeswoman Sgt. Lyn Tomioka said.
At about 6 p.m., as the bus neared 19th and Mission streets, a man described as “scruffy-looking” and possibly homeless attacked him at the back of the bus, stabbing him once, according to Tomioka.
She said the boy was sitting with a balloon on his lap at the time.
“It was an unprovoked attack on an innocent child,” she said, adding that there had been no conversation between the boy and the suspect, and no altercation between the suspect and anyone else on the bus, leading up to the attack.
Surveillance video on this particular bus was not functioning at the time of the attack, according to media reports.
The boy’s mother told Matier and Ross that “Muni is very dangerous.” I hate thinking that our daily transportation – the only transit option for many of us – is an unsafe place to be. But the horror that happened to this boy and the violent stories that we’ve received in the past leave me feeling that maybe our buses aren’t as safe as they should be.
Back in March, we learned that SFPD billed Muni a cool $12 million to “provide police services” and fund traffic enforcement. Eve Batey at the SFAppeal published an excellent report detailing what the SFPD is supposed to be doing on Muni. Would it have helped if we really saw cops regularly on the bus? Has it really come to this?
The police are working on a composite sketch of the attacker. Meanwhile, witnesses are asked to call police at (415) 575-4444 or text 84741, then typing “SFPD” and the tip.
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Horrible.
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If Muni can’t spend money on improving safety, maybe it’s time for a boycott.
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Aaron Reply:
September 5th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Muni would LOVE that! Less passengers to worry about, means less work…
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Why do yall white folks always got to blame a BLACK man for some dumb kid cuttin in line? You know yall can’t disrespec nobody just cuttin like that kid did. See if yall was in the hood aint NOBODY goin to cut in front of NOBODY cause we have RESPEC.
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Oompa Reply:
September 6th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
dude you’re messed up…blaming a little kid for being stabbed for no apparent reason? That’s just cold. How would you even know if the kid cut him or not? And its evident that it was a black man that stabbed him.
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I’m not a Muni apologist, far from it. But what is repeatedly overlooked about this story is that this was just as likely to happen on the street as it was on the bus. Possibly more so. This is what happens when you have a mentally ill man with a knife circulating amongst the general public. I’ve read about other attacks, not recently, involving knife attacks and mentally ill men in this city, although it is the first I’ve read about on Muni.
The argument could also be made that his mother being present, either on the bus or on the street or in any public place, would have made no difference. Most of us prepare ourselves for things we can imagine happening or think will probably happen, and having a random man commit a random act of violence is just not something we are prepared for. Even if we add police to every Muni bus and train, we can still be stabbed as we get on or off, or in any public place. We’ll clearly never be able to totally prevent this type of incident, but any potential reduction must come from a more general approach, including doing more for this city’s mentally ill.
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