UPDATE, 9:50 p.m. Monday: Metro is very saddened to learn that the victim succumbed to his injuries and died on Monday night, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
At approximately 9:20 a.m. Monday morning, two males became involved in an altercation on a downtown-bound train. During the altercation, one of the males used a knife to assault the other male.
The incident was discovered as the train stopped at the Vermont/Santa Monica station and both the Los Angeles Fire Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department were immediately notified. The victim was treated at the scene and transported to the hospital. As of 5 p.m., the victim was in critical condition, according to the Sheriff’s Department.
Train service to the station was suspended to accommodate the police investigation, which remains underway. The perpetrator also remains at large. The station reopened at 11:13 a.m. and regular Red Line service resumed.
Anyone with information about this incident is encouraged to contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Homicide Bureau at (323) 890-5500. If you prefer to provide information anonymously, you may call “Crime Stoppers” by dialing (800) 222-TIPS (8477), or texting the letters TIPLA plus your tip to CRIMES (274637), or by using the website http://lacrimestoppers.org.
UPDATE: Here is Monday afternoon’s article on the stabbing published in the Los Angeles Times.
Categories: Service Alerts
Heres is your opportunity Cameron. You saw the guy and now you can identify him.
Yeah guns, so instead of one person killed there would be several dead.
Well the old saying goes “criminals won’t break the law when they don’t know who’s armed.” Guns may not be the right answer, but protecting yourself with pepper spray is definitely good advice. It’s cheap and it can be done on an individual level than spending millions of tax dollars in hiring extra security. Besides, it’s probably a good idea anyway when riding public transit with all the crazy weirdos who share the transit system with the common, law-abiding citizens.
Metro should sell pepper spray at the Metro Store. I’m sure it’ll sell a lot.
Jaime,
Pepper spray is cheap and almost every girl has them. Just buy your own and keep it in your bag or attached to your keychain.
A single use California legal pepper spray can be bought for less than ten bucks. They can be found in most sporting goods stores like Big 5 and outdoor shops like Dick’s Sporting Goods or REI. Or just buy it off the internet like anything these days: http://www.peppersprayplus.com/2ozpepperspray.html
Against a knife wielding maniac like this, pepper spray would’ve been effective to knock the perpetrator down searing non-lethal pain until law enforcement arrives. Plus, it can shoot out the pepper spray far out of reach of a knife.
Josh Young,
That’s why I specifically said conceal carry. Plus, LA County residents aren’t the only ones that uses Metro. What if a person from Fresno visits LA and that person has a legal conceal carry permit that is issued by Fresno PD? Is that person ok to ride Metro while conceal carrying a gun? All conceal carry permits issued by any law enforcement agency in CA is legal throughout CA.
Right to protect yourself,
Funny you should mention liberalizing conceal carry permits because the news just broke a few minutes ago that The Calguns Foundation won the lawsuit (Lu v. Baca) regarding LASD’s unlawful practices of imposing a de facto ban on handgun licenses for LA County residents.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/prnewswire/press_releases/California/2014/01/14/SF46562
Which raises the question: Does Metro allow firearms to be carried by passengers who have legal carry permits?
There should be pepper sprays available on the trains for emergency use.
FYI, the link to the LA Times Article is not working.
Hi Phil;
Thanks for the heads up. I fixed it.
Steve Hymon
Editor, The Source
This could have happened anywhere. This is the second murder on the Red Line in its 20+ years in operation. The chance of being attached is .3 out of 100,000 riders. Just sayin
JCP,
Showing ID is not a requirement nor is it a rule to ride Metro, nor is it a requirement for all people to carry ID at all times. We’re not a police state where people should be demanded papers to travel about.
All we need to do is make it easier for people to protect themselves. Learn martial arts. Buy pepper spray. Liberalize conceal carry laws in LA County. Do what you need to protect yourself.
I ride the blue line and red every morning to and from work, I almost never see any police, sheriff or security presence at all in the early mornings. I definitely agree that Wi-Fi should be available just in case something happens where we need to notify the authorities without us becoming victims as well. I see people fighting all the time, I’ve seen two incidents where knives have been pulled and all we can do is sit there and watch… I will not risk my life getting up to push the button and become a target myself. I see people doing everyting they are not supposed to so on the train from something as simple as eating, drinking, loud music all the way up to smoking and rolling up joints without a care in the world…why???? because they know the cops will not be around to catch them. How many times have we seen them give a ticket to someone that does not have any form of Identification on them??? they will never see this person come into a court to pay tis ticket… They need to enforce all the rules and take them straight to jail until they can positively be identified… I am a big guy and I travel on the train because it makes financial sense for me but I might have to re-think my options as I no longer feel safe on the metro… May this man Rest In Peace and God grant the strength to his family and May we all be safe on our commute…Blessings….
K Town Commie,
Im not brusing it aside. I think people here think Metro is not doing enough which is false. People are crazy to want police officers in every car, this is not some dictatorship country. People shouldnt overreact and ask for a police state. I feel for the victim and his family, I hope the attacker gets caught but thinking rationally, we shouldnt let our emotions run wild.
This is truly sad that violence was used to solve an altercation, which eventually led to the person’s death. I think it speaks to deeper societal issues. Why would someone react like this on another human? The details are still not known so it’s hard to fully grasp and understand.
On another note, perhaps when Metro procures future heavy rail trains they can consider purchasing the trains that are linked with a walkway so that people in various cars can walk from one car to another. Subway trains in Taiwan, Korea, Seoul, HK, and other countries have trains like this. It adds a sense of security when passengers can move between trains and possibly away from individuals who may be causing a problem.
This is about responce time to alerts from drivers who rely on passengers often and Officer presence on trains or possibibly buses in high crime areas in future .
Will have to be a re-evalaution of how to handle assaults and robberys on MTA vehicles in future. This is also about the Sheriff dept dutie with the MTA . It envolves cooperation wibbetween the
Jaime,
Really? You think a person getting stabbed and ending up dead, and the criminal slipping away so easily can be brushed off simply by saying “one incident?” How cold.
This is a massive fail for the Metro no matter what other good things there are to be said about them. I predict this will end up becoming a major lawsuit and a massive review of how Metro handles their police patrols on the Metro Rail system.
One incident happens and all of a sudden metro is not doing their job. What about the hundreds of other incidents that have been handled right by Metro? I don’t see any praise for that. Its true that when the good deeds (work) go unnoticed but the one bad one and theres a big stink about it.
Jeremy, you are spot on. I’m much more likely to send an inconspicuous text to Metro sheriffs/security (or maybe even use the Transit Watch app, though I know it’s for non-emergencies) than getting up and conspicuously using a railcar-mounted speakerphone to report a violent event. Using the speakerphone just marks me as another target for someone willing to assault another. It’s time to wire the underground portions of Metro for cell or wi-fi service. (I’m sure money is tight, but there must be some public safety or homeland security grant funds floating around out there for such a project.)
It would really be helpful to have Wi-Fi and/or cell phone reception on the subways so that when these things happen if an officer DOESN’T see it happen, fellow passengers can contact Metro/Police and response times can be cut down. It’s a safety issue.
The only time people are using those emergency call buttons is when things reach the extreme, but I’d be willing to report suspicious activity more if there was an easy way to do it. Unfortunately, underground you’re currently cut off. It’s a safety issue.
I was three seats away from the stabbing and I locked eyes with the victim for about 10 seconds after the stabbing – I swear we had a moment where I could just see that he didn’t want to die and that he was worried about his family. Whatever the case may be it can be up for interpretation but I hope this horrible person is caught. No one should die because someone accidentally bumped into someone else…even if they act hard. I hope they catch him so I can ID the suspect…and I hope they give me the opportunity to because I know exactly what he looks like. Too many people were giving the police false information. I was verbally upset while some people were giving testimony to officers because they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. If anyone can lead me to the man’s family then I would love to tell them my moment I had with him. I just wish he would have survived. RIP.
Josh Young;
If your a rider on the Red Line you would know that the trains have multiple cars and unless the operator is alerted he can do nothing. Also for passenger safety operators are instructed to open all the doors on both buses and trains at a safe location when a life threatening incident occurs. Last thing they want to see is other passengers or the bus operators injured or killed.
There are not cops at every station in other cities unless you are talking about North Korea.
In the UK and in Japan, that’s exactly what they do. The police are stationary at the stations, not roaming around randomly on the trains. If something happens on board like what happened here, they would contact the police at the next station. If you secure the stations which is where the entry and exits are into the rail system, you secure the entire system.
Metro should re-do their LEO patrol policies, pronto. It’s not the rail that has to be patrolled making everyone feeling guilty before proven innocent, it’s staffing officers right at the entry and exit points into the system so that criminals don’t enter the system in the first place. And if they somehow do like this case, it makes it tougher for them to escape out of the system. Because that’s what criminals do: they run away. That’s where you capture them, when they run away.
The more Metro keeps letting criminals run away scot-free, the more public humiliation they will get for being a system where criminals can get away easily.
Josh Young,
You’re absolutely right. Metro once again, as usual, failed big time.
You know, if this happened elsewhere, the rail operator would just radio the police at the next station, lock it down so no one makes an escape, and the criminal gets caught because there’s no where to hide.
Yet, Metro’s dumb policies just let the criminal escape because the cops were on a different train and they had to waste their time getting to the station after the incident. When will Metro realize that it’s not effective to be putting the cops randomly on the trains, it should be that the cops should be stationed at the exits of each station!
Opps! Is Metro only can lock out the legitimate riders while attempted murders can roam the system freely at will? Metro can’t even get the video footage of the incident after all these hours.
“The perpetrator also remains at large.”
Umm, why was the perpetrator allowed to make an easy escape in the first place?
Oh yeah, that’s right. We don’t have locked turnstiles on exit and we don’t have cops stationed right at the exits like every other city in the world that gets transit right. Instead we do random, ineffective police checks and do TAP-in on entry only.
Genius.
I’m a daily rider and a full grown man and I am constantly uncomfortable on the Red Line. Maybe instead of having a dozen officers at the ends of the lines checking passes and fining poor people you should have 1 or 2 on the actual trains….or at least some kind of security guards.