6 Die in Greyhound Crash After Driver’s Throat Is Cut

A passenger on a Greyhound bus slashed the driver’s throat in a tussle for the steering wheel, causing a rollover early Wednesday that killed six people and prompted the company to temporarily suspend services nationwide at a time of widespread travel jitters.

Federal officials said there was no sign that the attack, which occurred shortly after 4 a.m. as the bus headed through rural Tennessee on its way to Florida, was connected to terrorism. The driver survived, but the assailant died during the crash, along with five passengers. Thirty-four other injured travelers were taken to area hospitals.

“This is not an act of terrorism. It’s an isolated incident,” said R. Joe Clark, special agent in charge of the FBI’s office in Knoxville, Tenn.

Clark identified the suspected attacker as Igric Damir, a 29-year-old undocumented immigrant from Croatia who apparently had boarded the bus a day earlier in Chicago and attempted to hijack it using a “sharp implement.”

“I believe he was trying to take over control and drive the vehicle,” Clark said during a news conference held in the thick grass of a median strip near the overturned bus, about 60 miles southeast of Nashville on Interstate 24.

Clark said it was unclear why the man wanted to take command of the bus, or where he wanted to go. He said Damir had entered the United States through Miami on a 30-day visa in 1999 and never left.

“This is probably a disturbed individual,” Clark said. “We do not know that yet. We may never know that.”

The federal law enforcement involvement--and the suspension of Greyhound Lines bus service for nearly eight hours--were signs of how edgy the nation has become since the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Since then, there has been a severe downturn in U.S. travel. Clark said one objective of the latest investigation will be to make sure the bus incident was unrelated to terrorism.

The bus ended up on its side in a broad roadside thicket. Several victims thrown out of the vehicle were crushed, authorities said, but others who were ejected survived. The crash shut down westbound traffic on the crucial artery all day.

Authorities said the driver, who was not identified, underwent surgery for neck wounds and was recovering well. A doctor at the Manchester hospital where the driver was treated said the patient reported having been attacked with a razor or box-cutter knife--the type believed used by some of the hijackers during the terror attacks.

Clark said a sharp weapon had been found, but he declined to describe it.

One of the injured passengers, 19-year-old Carly Rinearson of Fort Wayne, Ind., said she was sitting directly behind the driver when the assault took place. She said the attacker asked her and another passenger in another front-row seat if he could have their seats. They refused.

“And he kept asking me what time it was every so many minutes. . . . And then he just went up to the bus driver and slit his throat, and the bus driver turned the wheel and the bus tipped over,” Rinearson told a Tennessee television station.

Her father, Robert Rinearson, said in a telephone interview from his home in Fort Wayne that his daughter--a restaurant hostess on her way to visit a friend in Conyers, Ga.--had suffered only “bumps and bruises” but remained at a hospital in Manchester, where state and federal authorities were interviewing passengers.

The elder Rinearson said his daughter chose to travel by bus for the two-day journey from Fort Wayne because it was cheaper than flying. It was her first trip alone. “We were concerned--not so much because of the terrorist thing. . . . I was worried about the everyday serial-killer stuff,” said Rinearson, a school safety supervisor.

Greyhound officials stopped bus operations across the country immediately after the accident. The largest inter-city carrier in North America, Greyhound moves 70,000 passengers a day on 1,800 buses.

The suspension, lifted at midday, was a precaution against possible broader attacks, said Jamille Bradfield, a spokeswoman for the Dallas-based company.

“We just didn’t know. As a precaution, we temporarily halted nationwide service.” She said buses en route were sidelined at their next stop.

The suspension stranded bus passengers around the country. The Greyhound terminal in downtown Houston was all but deserted. Claudia Collins, a 48-year-old clerk typist, had been waiting to take a bus home to Dallas since 7 a.m. But she found the temporary shutdown reassuring.

“They obviously had a security plan in place before this happened. Otherwise, how could they have shut down so fast? I like that they thought ahead. It makes me feel safer,” she said.

But Jackie Crawford, a grandmother from Bryan, Texas, who was fidgeting in a chair, sounded less pleased. “I don’t know what this world is coming to,” she said. “To be scared to ride a bus? You couldn’t get me on a plane, that’s out of the question. But there was always the bus. Now I’m scared.”

At the Greyhound station in Los Angeles, only a dozen departures were canceled. But that temporarily sidelined a number of passengers who had arrived on overnight buses from San Francisco and Sacramento on their way to Texas and other points east. James Lovett, waiting since 4:30 a.m., hoped to catch a bus bound for St. Louis. “I took the bus rather than fly, because I thought it would be safer. Now, this happens,” he said.

Times researcher Lianne Hart in Houston and staff writer Kenneth Reich in Los Angeles contributed to this report.