Man with cleaver slashes passenger on BART
A man wearing a balaclava and pacing up and down a BART train this afternoon slashed a fellow passenger across the back with a meat cleaver, and caused more than a dozen other riders to scurry away in fear, according to a witness to the scene.
Police arrested Charles Johnson, 24, near 1 p.m. as a suspect in the attack, according to a BART statement. Johnson was booked on two charges: assault with a deadly weapon and robbery. He allegedly attempted to steal the victim’s backpack, which was recovered, alongside the cleaver, at the scene.
The victim, who is 25 years old, was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries. James Temple, a journalist who was in the car with the suspect, said the the victim was taken away on a gurney, seemingly in good spirits.
Temple described a man holding a rectangular butcher cleaver pacing up and down a BART car on an eastbound train in the Transbay Tube. He said he initially saw a passenger at the end of his car “jump out of the way” of the cleaver-wielding man, and then “all kinds of people trying to jump away.”
“Everyone started running through the cars, trying to get as much distance between themselves and this guy as possible,” he said. Temple said people were cowering in their seats, “trying to get as close to the edges of the BART cars as possible” as the man walked back and forth in the aisle.
“I jumped out of the way once and landed partially on a woman who was sitting,” he added. “I was just trying to get away.”
The passengers then fled between cars to the front of the BART train, where Temple said they congregated in a group.
“When we got to the very front, we ran out of cars to run through.”
At this point, the dozen-plus passengers, communicating with the train operator, were “just asking the operator to go faster, we just wanted to get to West Oakland, we wanted to get out,” Temple said.
It was then that Temple realized another passenger had been injured. “One guy said he had been bludgeoned by him, but in the end looks like he got slashed by the back.”
When the train arrived at West Oakland Station, Temple said the operator saw the cleaver-wielding man leave the train via camera and shut the BART doors behind him. BART police arrived “within minutes,” Temple said, and attended to the victim.
A BART spokesperson said normal service had resumed by 1:30 p.m. The stopped Antioch-bound train temporarily caused delays.
“I’m not gonna lie, man, it was pretty scary,” Temple said. “When you actually see someone walking up and down BART with a cleaver — it was scary, and I and everyone just wanted to get as far away from him as possible, which is hard to do on a BART in the middle of the tunnel.”
This story has been updated with a statement from BART police.
Source: Mission Local
