Greyhound being sued in fatal wreck caused by attack on driver

By Jim Greene

Published on August 02, 2005

On October 3, 2001, Darnir Igric, a Croatian who had been heard voicing racist and anti-American sentiments, attacked driver Garfield Sands and slit his throat with a box cutter. In the struggle, the bus, which was traveling at about 70 miles per hour on a rural Tennessee highway, flipped on its side, killing five passengers and Igric. Sands survived the incident.

In arguments which were successful in an earlier suit in Tennessee, the Georgia suit alleges the company might have prevented the attack by better preparing its buses and drivers for the possibility of such an incident.

Company records indicate that there have been about 60 incidents of passengers attacking drivers or trying to take over control of a bus, and that Greyhound abandoned a plan in 1998 to install safety shields around their drivers. After the 2001 attack and an armed attempt a year later to take over a bus near Fresno, California, the company used federal grant money to begin the installation of driver shields on its fleet of nearly 2,000 buses.

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