Driver Lives With Nightmares After Attack

Like many other bus drivers, Walter Loggins was not the only member of his family working in a public transit job. Three of his brothers drove buses in the Bay Area, and Loggins was settled nicely into a 12-year career with the San Francisco Municipal Railway--until July 27, 1984.

On that Friday afternoon, during the final trip of a long workday, Loggins pulled into the city’s financial district. Waiting for him at one corner was a young man with a cup in his hand.

As he stepped aboard the bus, the passenger called to Loggins--and hurled the cup of caustic chemical in the driver’s face.

As his attacker fled, the blinded driver struggled from his seat and turned to dozens of passengers for help. One rider, in an eyewitness account to police, later described those tortured moments.

‘Smoke Coming From Face’

“After about five or six seconds, the driver began to scream, ‘Help me, my eyes, help me!’ ” she said. “There seemed to be smoke coming from the driver’s face and clothing. The odor was overpowering (as) we left the bus.”

Loggins could feel passengers brushing past him to escape, and after stumbling off the bus, he finally was helped by passers-by and some employees at a nearby bank.

The story of an unprovoked acid attack on a Muni bus driver was headline news in the Bay Area. The mayor announced a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of his assailant.

And Walter Loggins, although he was not permanently scarred or disfigured, has spent the last year struggling with the psychological aftermath. For transit officials and bus drivers in San Francisco, he has also become a tragic symbol of a sometimes-risky profession.

Today, the 37-year-old Loggins is reluctant to discuss the incident.

He fully regained his sight a few months afterward, although he later had to undergo an eye operation. He still wears dark sunglasses, even in the living room of his home, where the drapes are continually drawn to ward off the sunlight.

The attack has left no visible scars, which Loggins credited to his practice of using petroleum jelly on his dry skin and to a quick turn of his head that deflected some of the chemical, whose precise type was never determined.

But the nightmares and periodic headaches have not disappeared.

“I’m just trying to get my life back together,” he said softly. “I still have problems sleeping at night thinking about it.”

Loggins has returned to a desk job but doubts that he will drive a bus again.

“I just tried to do my job. I didn’t want to hassle nobody and didn’t think I should be hassled. . . . I really did enjoy the job,” he said.

In the moments after being temporarily blinded, Loggins recalls being seized by the fear that his blindness was permanent and remembers concentrating on what his wife and young daughter looked like. And although he has shaken off the bitterness that enshrouded him for months, Loggins still talks about the passengers who failed to come to his aid.

“I thought they would do something to help,” he said. “I trusted them, and, yes, I was disappointed.”

Loggins is certain that his assailant was the same man who had thrown a sandwich and cup of juice at him only 20 minutes earlier. The bus rider, angered by a jammed bus door, had departed after a brief argument with Loggins.

Suspect Freed

But a suspect, identified by Loggins as his attacker, was freed after a jury deadlocked last December, with a majority of jurors voting for acquittal. A mistrial was called, and in February charges were dismissed.

Loggins is now a defendant--along with the City and County of San Francisco and a local police inspector--in a lawsuit filed by that individual, who claims that Loggins wrongly identified him and made him a victim of malicious prosecution.

Loggins merely shrugs at the turn of events.

“I think I’ll get over it,” he said. “I hope I do. But it’s going to take time. It’s going to take time.”