4 Youths Shoot Up Oakland Bus, Kill Driver

Four youths boarded a bus at a downtown stop early today and sprayed the inside of the vehicle with semiautomatic gunfire, killing the driver and wounding four passengers, police said.

Investigators were examining whether the attack may have been a revenge shooting against the bus district for the death of a woman killed in a collision with a bus the day before, said Police Lt. Jim Hahn.

“As the bus passed the shop where I was working in the window I heard--Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! And Bang!--six to 10 shots, and then the bus stopped,” said a 15-year-old girl who did not want to be identified.

After the shooting, she said she saw at least three people run from the bus, one of whom collapsed on the ground holding his stomach. She said the driver was slumped in his seat, with wounds to the head and torso.

Driver Billy (B.J.) Givens, 43, died about an hour after he was hit with multiple gunshots, Hahn said.

He said robbery was ruled out as a motive in the attack.

An AC Transit bus driver was involved in a fatal collision Thursday about five blocks from where the attack occurred. Ellen Palmer, 52, of Oakland was killed in the accident, in which her car ran a red light.

Hahn said investigators have not been able to substantiate rumors that bystanders made threats against the district over the accident.

AC driver Lester Dixon said today at the district’s Emeryville corporation yard that two young men entered the building Thursday night and asked the dispatcher “for the name of the driver who killed the woman in the bus accident earlier in the day.” The dispatcher refused to divulge the name.

Givens, also of Oakland, was not the driver involved in the accident, district authorities said.

Speculation among most drivers at the corporation yard was that the shootings may have been by a group of people who knew Palmer. Police would not comment on that aspect.

Officers are also checking whether the attack was drug-related retaliation against one of the passengers. The neighborhood at 34th Street and Telegraph Avenue is one of several in Oakland in which heavy drug dealing occurs.

Hahn said the passengers who were hit suffered wounds ranging “from minor to critical.” He added that their names and the hospital where they are being treated are being withheld.

The gunmen, described as black males in their late teens and early 20s, fled on foot after the attack.