thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
cops are there and he comes up and he picks the head up and he's waving it in the window. I just smoked a cigarette with this man [the victim] earlier, the head, and he's shaking it back and forth at the window and it's ... intense right, it's sickening.Garnet CatonHe put his bags in the overhead compartment. He didn't say a word to anybody. He seemed totally normal. He had sunglasses on. He sat down. And then, about a half an hour later, we heard this blood-curdling scream and turned around and the guy was standing up, stabbing this guy repeatedly, repeatedly, like, I dunno, must have been 40, 50 times in the neck and in the chest area. When he was attacking him, he was calm as like, it was like he was at the beach. He (was) totally calm, he didn't say anything. There was no rage or, or anything. He was just like a robot stabbing the guy.We exited the bus. Everybody got off the bus. But a few of us, me and the trucker and one of the Greyhound drivers went back on the bus to go see what was going on and that's when we saw ... he had the guy on the ground, he was cutting his head off and pretty much gutting him.That trucker ... he had a crowbar and we ran and got a hammer and stuff. Me and the other bus driver, there, tried to guard the door; put our bodies up against the door and, you know, waiting for him to come out and whatnot.And he went back and brought the head to the front and pretty much, you know, displayed it to us like that and then dropped it on the ground in front of us. Very calmly, all very calmly, he was wearing sunglasses and like, you know, it was no big deal to him.*************************************************************Beheading victim 'never got into a single fight in his whole life', August 1.PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, MAN. A man accused of beheading a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus uttered not a word in court Friday and the victim's friends were still at a loss as to how anyone could have attacked someone they say never hurt a soul."There was nothing in the world that could set him off or [make] him do anything wrong to anybody," said William Caron, who knew Tim McLean, 22, since Grade 7."As far as I've known him, he'd never got into a single fight in his whole life."The victim of the vicious attack on a Greyhound bus has not officially been identified. But friends have started a Facebook memorial group that includes his name, Tim McLean, and this photograph. (From Facebook)Police had no answers Thursday as to what prompted a man on a Greyhound bus to suddenly stand up and repeatedly stab his seatmate and behead him in front of horrified passengers.There were no answers from a courtroom in Portage la Prairie, Man., where Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton, made his first court appearance on a charge of
second-degree murder.Mr. Li his face bruised, one hand bandaged and his legs shackled quietly shuffled into the room with his head bowed. He did not make eye contact with anyone the entire time he was before the judge.He would not even reply when the judge asked him if he was going to get a lawyer and only nodded slightly when asked whether he was exercising his right not to speak.The accused, wearing a grey T-shirt and prisoner's vest, appeared to be about five-foot-eight or nine with a stocky build.Passengers had described Mr. McLean's attacker as a big man who weighed at least 200 pounds.The Crown asked for a psychiatric assessment, but the judge said he wanted to give Mr. Li a chance to talk to a lawyer about that."It's early and I think the judge just wants to respect his rights to ... speak to counsel and he's giving him that opportunity," Crown prosecutor Larry Hodgson said outside court. "I don't think it will be very long that they'll allow him to do that [be without a lawyer]."Mr. Li was charged after Mr. McLean died in a gruesome attack on a Greyhound bus that was travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg.Police did not release details about his death. But passengers said the young man died in an appalling attack in which his seat-mate silently stood up and repeatedly stabbed him before severing his head and carving up his body.Friends say they simply cannot understand why anyone would attack the thin young man, just five-feet, five inches tall, and by all accounts easy-going."He was just such an amazing guy. He had a great personality," Mr. McLean's long-time friend and Mr. Caron's wife, Jodi Lang, said on the lawn of their Winnipeg home.Mr. McLean had been working at carnival booths and was coming home from Edmonton to be with his family. He led a mostly quiet life, preferring to spend time playing cards and the board game Risk, Mr. Caron said.His friend liked to travel, which was the reason he spent three summers working the carnival circuit, Mr. Caron added."He never cared for sitting around, unless it was for a weekend with the guys playing Risk. He was always big on travelling. He didn't like to sit in one place."Mr. McLean and Mr. Caron got their first tattoos together. Mr. Caron opted for a ghost riding a motorcycle. Mr. McLean chose a joker a theme he would use for his Myspace web page under the name Jokawild, where he described his interests as "playin vids, chillin', havin a good time."Mr. Hodgson couldn't offer many details about Li."I know he was from Edmonton. I don't know why he was on the bus. That's still under investigation."The RCMP said Mr. Li has no known criminal record.Mr. Hodgson said if Mr. Li doesn't get his own lawyer, the court could appoint one or the case could proceed anyway.Mr. Li's next court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday in Portage la Prairie.Meanwhile, tributes to the victim were pouring into social networking and media websites. A Facebook website called "R.I.P. Tim"
quickly sprang up after news of the attack."I can't believe this is happening," wrote Leah Dryburgh of Winnipeg. "Tim, you were the best guy ever. You didn't deserve this at all."It was on Tuesday night that Greyhound bus 1170 rolled across the darkening prairie. Passengers were dozing off as The Legend of Zorro played on the television screen.A man of about 20, making his way home to Manitoba from Edmonton, was sitting on his own in the back row, headphones covering his ears, sleeping with his cheek resting on the window pane.He barely acknowledged the 40-year-old man in sunglasses who, having boarded the bus in Brandon, first sat near the front, then walked down the aisle, slid his bags into the overhead bin, and sat down next to him.The strangers sat together in silence for a half hour or more, said Garnet Caton, a 26-year-old seismic driller who was in the row ahead.Then the calm of an otherwise unremarkable bus ride was shattered by a sound so chilling it could only be described as somewhere between a dog howling and a baby crying."It was a blood-curdling scream," he said. "I turned around and the guy sitting right [behind] me was standing up and stabbing another guy with a big Rambo knife ... Right in the throat. Repeatedly."Mr. Caton said the attack was utterly unprovoked.He watched in horror as the man, described as tall and well-built with close-cropped hair, plunged his hunting knife into the victim eight or nine times, sending blood spraying across the back of the bus.The driver, hearing the screams, pulled to the side of the road and opened the doors, allowing passengers to flee. They scrambled over one another and, in their haste, knocked an elderly woman to the floor. One mother, who was seated near the back, threw her toddler forward several rows to get the child away from danger, a witness said.Mr. Caton, who served five years in the Canadian Forces and was closest to the attacker, paused before leaving, torn momentarily between concern for his own safety and the thought of abandoning the bleeding victim. He turned to another man nearby and asked for his help."I said, 'Give me a hand and let's get this guy.' And the other guy took off," he said.It was only moments later that the victim's screams went silent. Mr. Caton knew he was too late.Mr. Caton jumped off the bus, and was met by a trucker who had stopped after seeing the commotion. The trucker grabbed a crowbar and Mr. Caton got a hammer and they tried to contain the attacker on the bus. The attacker swung his knife at them through the partially closed bus door.Then the incident became even more macabre. The attacker returned to the victim's side and began sawing through his neck. A few moments later, he walked to the front of the bus holding a decapitated human head, displaying it to the 34 passengers and the bus driver standing outside."I got sick after I saw the head thing," Mr. Caton said. "Some people were puking,
some people were crying, some people were shocked."The killer, meanwhile, appeared unfazed."He just looked at us and dropped the head on the ground, totally calm," Mr. Caton said.Reports from the scene indicate the man then ate pieces of the corpse.It was at that point that the RCMP arrived and a standoff developed, with armed officers surrounding the bus.For more than three hours the man taunted police, moving around the bus and cutting away at the corpse. Around 1:30 a.m. local time, he broke a window and tried to jump out but was quickly arrested.At the scene Staff Sergeant Steve Colwell could offer no explanation for what prompted the attack, and had no information on whether the attacker was known to police or had a history of violence or instability.Police did not release the victim's name because they had not been able to notify his family. But CTV reported Friday that his family learned of the attack through the media.Police praised the reaction of the bus driver and passengers, which they say may have averted further injuries."They were very brave. They reacted swiftly and calmly in exiting the bus and as a result nobody else was injured," Staff Sgt. Colwell said. "It's not every day that someone gets stabbed on a bus. I imagine it would be fairly traumatic for the other passengers on the bus and the way they reacted was extraordinary."The passengers were eventually taken to an RCMP station in Brandon to be questioned, and then put up for the night in a local hotel. Most stayed up late, bleary-eyed strangers gathering in small groups, talking through a horrifying event that defied rational explanation."I tried to lay down at 4 o'clock this morning and I was up 10 minutes later, because every time I close my eyes I see this man in the window with some guy's head I just smoked a cigarette with an hour before," said passenger Cody Olmstead, who was on his way home to Nova Scotia.Mr. Olmstead may have been the last person to speak to the victim before he was killed. He said they exchanged pleasantries, but not much more. The young man, who was about 5 foot 8 and 150 pounds, was dressed in baggy, hip-hop clothing, passengers said."He seemed to be all right. I didn't get to know him," he said. "He just told me where he was going. I told him where I was going."At first, Mr. Olmstead said, he thought it was a regular fistfight. But when somebody yelled "knife," everyone started to run."What can you do when a man's got a knife the size of, you know, it's a big knife. So we just tried to stay out of the way," he said.He said he didn't notice any tension between the two men beforehand, or even a minor incident that could have sparked a confrontation."No, there was no tension. The guy got on the bus, sat down beside the fellow. The fellow offered him the seat, woke up, said, 'Yeah, go ahead,' fell back asleep. Next thing you know, he's getting
The standoff lasted for hours."At 1:28 a.m., the suspect . . . attempted to jump out of the bus after breaking a window. He was immediately subdued and arrested without incident and is currently in RCMP custody," Colwell said.The suspect's name has not been released."He didn't do anything to provoke the guy. The guy just took a knife out and stabbed him, started stabbing him like crazy and cut his head off," said Garnet Caton, 26, a passenger on the Edmonton-to-Winnipeg bus."Some people were puking, some people were crying, other people were in shock. . . . Everybody was running, screaming off the bus."Caton said the attacker was only on the bus for a brief time, after boarding in western Manitoba.Passenger Cody Olmstead said he had been watching a movie on the bus just before the attack began."We were watching Zorro; next thing I know, I hear someone screaming." Olmstead, 21, told reporters he had smoked a cigarette earlier in the trip with the victim, who got on the bus in Edmonton.He said the victim said he was going to Winnipeg.After the bus pulled over and the terrified passengers fled, Olmstead said the attacker was taunting those outside with the victim's severed head."He came back, standing in the doorway with the head, looked at him, dropped the head and went back and started cutting buddy back up."He said when police showed up, the taunting continued. "He come up and picks the head up and he's waving it in the window. I just smoked a cigarette with this man earlier - like, the head. He's shaking it back and forth in the window."Caton said he and other passengers prevented the attacker from getting off the blood-soaked bus by threatening him with makeshift weapons - a hammer and a crowbar."We were telling him, 'Stay put, stay put, stay there, don't try to come out.' He tried to get the bus working and the bus driver disabled the bus somehow in the back. I'm not sure how he did it, and at that point, I think the police showed up," he said, adding officers rushed them away.Caton and other passengers said the attacker and his victim, who was listening to music on headphones, were sitting together at the rear of the bus, and the attack appeared to be unprovoked; no words were exchanged.He told a TV station the attacker had actually changed seats to sit next to his victim just before the killing.Caton described the man who attacked the passenger as bald and wearing sunglasses. He seemed oblivious to others when the stabbing occurred, said Caton, adding he was struck by how calm the man was."There was no rage or anything. He was like a robot, stabbing the guy," he said.Caton said the victim boarded in Edmonton, was wearing hip-hop clothing and appeared to be around 20 years of age.After the killing, the other passengers were later taken to Brandon, Man., to be interviewed by police and to stay overnight at a hotel there. Crisis counsellors were also at the hotel to provide support to
the passengers, and counsellors could be seen chatting with them outside the hotel as groups went out to local stores for snacks or to smoke cigarettes.One small boy, who was with an adult man and woman, was given a plush teddy bear by a crisis health worker. "The first thing I heard was something like a terrible type (of) yowl, and that was from the guy who got stabbed," said an elderly woman on the bus, from Winnipeg.The woman and her adult daughter said they were three or four rows in front of the man when the attack began."(My daughter said) 'Oh my God,' and everybody else started screaming," she said. "They had terror in their eyes."Two other passengers on the bus, a 22-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman from France, said they were heading to Winnipeg after visiting the woman's father in Whitehorse. The 22-year-old man said in French that he saw a man holding a long knife repeatedly stab another passenger. He and his girlfriend said they were shocked by the attack, and the isolation in the middle of the prairie when it occurred."There was nowhere to go," she said.Speaking in Quebec City, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the issue of safety on buses may need to be examined more closely once the legal process of this case is over."We're never closed to looking at how Canadians can be more safe and more secure," Day told reporters in Quebec on Thursday. "This particular incident, as horrific as it is, is obviously extremely rare."Greyhound spokesman Eric Wesley, speaking from Texas, said drivers are trained to get help as soon as they can when incidents occur."This is very rare, unique occurrence. Bus transportation is one of the safest modes of transportation. This is highly unique that something like this happened," he said. "Our drivers are trained to provide the safest travel for all our passengers, and every time an incident occurs, they know to pull the bus over and call 911."Wesley said counselling will be provided and monetary compensation will be determined on an individual basis."We are going to do whatever we need to provide the passengers with counselling or any other measures to make sure they're taken care of."*************************************************************Alleged bus butcher quiet in court, Joe Friesen, August 1.PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, MAN. -- The man accused in the beheading of a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba uttered not a word when he made his first court appearance Friday.Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton, his feet shackled, shuffled into a courtroom in Portage la Prairie, Man., with his head bowed. He did not make eye contact with anyone the entire time he was before the judge.He would not even reply when the judge asked him if he was going to get a lawyer, and only nodded slightly when asked whether he was exercising his right not to speak.The Crown asked for a psychiatric assessment, but the judge said he wanted to give Li a chance to talk to a lawyer about that.It's early and I think the judge just
wants to respect his rights to ... speak to counsel and he's giving him that opportunity, Crown prosecutor Larry Hodgson said outside court. I don't think it will be very long that they'll allow him to do that.Mr. Hodgson said if Mr. Li doesn't get his own lawyer, the court could appoint one or the case could proceed anyway.Mr. Li's next court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday in Portage la Prairie.Mr. Li is charged with second-degree murder in the gruesome slaying of Tim McLean, 22, on a Greyhound bus that was travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg. Police have not identified the victim, but friends say it was Mr. McLean.Passengers say the young man was stabbed repeatedly before he was beheaded and his body carved up. Police have only confirmed that a man was stabbed.Some passengers also described Mr. McLean's attacker as a big man who weighed at least 200 pounds.The man who appeared in court Friday wearing a grey T-shirt and prisoner's vest appeared to be about five-foot-eight or nine with a stocky build.Mr. Hodgson couldn't offer many details about Mr. Li.I know he was from Edmonton. I don't know why he was on the bus. That's still under investigation.The RCMP said Mr. Li has no known criminal record.Meanwhile, tributes to the victim were pouring into social networking and media websites. A Facebook website called R.I.P. Tim quickly sprang up after news of the attack.I can't believe this is happening, wrote Leah Dryburgh of Winnipeg. Tim, you were the best guy ever. You didn't deserve this at all.Friends described Mr. McLean as a quiet, easy-going carnival worker who was heading home to Winnipeg after a job in Edmonton.It was on that night that Greyhound bus 1170 rolled across the darkening prairie. Passengers were dozing off as The Legend of Zorro played on the television screen.An aboriginal man of about 18 or 20, making his way home to Manitoba from Edmonton, was sitting on his own in the back row, headphones covering his ears, sleeping with his cheek resting on the window pane.He barely acknowledged the 40-year-old man in sunglasses who, having boarded the bus in Brandon, first sat near the front, then walked down the aisle, slid his bags into the overhead bin, and sat down next to him.The strangers sat together in silence for a half hour or more, said Garnet Caton, a 26-year-old seismic driller who was in the row ahead.Then the calm of an otherwise unremarkable bus ride was shattered by a sound so chilling it could only be described as somewhere between a dog howling and a baby crying.It was a blood-curdling scream, he said. I turned around and the guy sitting right [behind] me was standing up and stabbing another guy with a big Rambo knife ... Right in the throat. Repeatedly.Mr. Caton said the attack was utterly unprovoked.He watched in horror as the man, described as tall and well-built with close-cropped hair, plunged his hunting knife into the victim eight or nine times, sending blood spraying across the back of the bus.The driver, hearing the screams,
pulled to the side of the road and opened the doors, allowing passengers to flee. They scrambled over one another and, in their haste, knocked an elderly woman to the floor. One mother, who was seated near the back, threw her toddler forward several rows to get the child away from danger, a witness said.Mr. Caton, who served five years in the Canadian Forces and was closest to the attacker, paused before leaving, torn momentarily between concern for his own safety and the thought of abandoning the bleeding victim. He turned to another man nearby and asked for his help.I said, Give me a hand and let's get this guy.' And the other guy took off, he said.It was only moments later that the victim's screams went silent. Mr. Caton knew he was too late.Mr. Caton jumped off the bus, and was met by a trucker who had stopped after seeing the commotion. The trucker grabbed a crowbar and Mr. Caton got a hammer and they tried to contain the attacker on the bus. The attacker swung his knife at them through the partially closed bus door.Then the incident became even more macabre. The attacker returned to the victim's side and began sawing through his neck. A few moments later, he walked to the front of the bus holding a decapitated human head, displaying it to the 34 passengers and the bus driver standing outside.I got sick after I saw the head thing, Mr. Caton said. Some people were puking, some people were crying, some people were shocked.The killer, meanwhile, appeared unfazed.He just looked at us and dropped the head on the ground, totally calm, Mr. Caton said.Reports from the scene indicate the man then ate pieces of the corpse.It was at that point that the RCMP arrived and a standoff developed, with armed officers surrounding the bus.For more than three hours the man taunted police, moving around the bus and cutting away at the corpse. Around 1:30 a.m. local time, he broke a window and tried to jump out but was quickly arrested.At the scene Staff Sergeant Steve Colwell could offer no explanation for what prompted the attack, and had no information on whether the attacker was known to police or had a history of violence or instability.Police did not release the victim's name because they had not been able to notify his family. But CTV reported Friday that his family learned of the attack through the media.Police praised the reaction of the bus driver and passengers, which they say may have averted further injuries. They were very brave. They reacted swiftly and calmly in exiting the bus and as a result nobody else was injured, Staff Sgt. Colwell said. It's not every day that someone gets stabbed on a bus. I imagine it would be fairly traumatic for the other passengers on the bus and the way they reacted was extraordinary.The passengers were eventually taken to an RCMP station in Brandon to be questioned, and then put up for the night in a local hotel. Most stayed up late, bleary-eyed