LA court hears eyewitness testimony of bus-jacking incident that left one man dead

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Passengers of an LA Metro bus that was hijacked last year testified Tuesday about the shocking and violent incident that left one man dead.

The driver of the bus who was lauded as a hero for activating a hidden emergency signal also testified during the first of what is expected to be a three-day preliminary hearing for Lamont Campbell, the 51-year-old who is charged with 12 felony counts including murder, attempted murder, carjacking and five counts of kidnapping. Campbell pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors played surveillance video footage taken from inside the bus, showing a man with a hoodie wander nonchalantly toward the front, his arms buried deep inside the pocket of his sweatshirt. Without warning or provocation, the man pulls out a handgun and quickly fires four shots. The first shot knocks the shooter off balance, and he falls to the floor, but he keeps firing. More than one of the shots hit a passenger, 48-year-Anthony Rivera, a former national guardsman who had been working as a parking attendant at Dodgers Stadium. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The shooter reloaded his gun. Minutes later, he threatened another passenger, Arzetta Coleman, and fired a gun at her as if to threaten her. He then forced the bus driver to keep driving, leading police on a slow-speed pursuit for about an hour. Eventually, police were able to disable the bus. A SWAT team stormed it using flash grenades, and the suspect surrendered.

A young man named Dewan Jenkins testified that he was coming back from Las Vegas, having taken a train to Union Station, where he boarded the 81 bus heading to South LA, toward his godmother’s house. When a man in a hoodie got on the bus, shortly after midnight on Sept. 25, 2024, he became instantly suspicious.

“I’m suspicious of everybody on the bus,” Jenkins testified on Tuesday. “You should not have a hoodie on the bus at nighttime.” He later added: “My gut feeling was telling me something bad was gonna happen.”

He was about to get off the bus at a stop; but he hesitated. The doors closed. And that’s when the shooter opened fire.

“At that point, I’m like, in shock. I didn’t know how to react,” Jenkins said. “He looked at me in my eye, it was like — kind of got that feeling like, let me just be quiet and kind of get myself off this bus, because I could be the one who got shot.”

Jenkins hid under two bus seats and eventually managed to pry open the rear exit doors and force himself out of the moving bus to safety, and he borrowed a stranger’s phone to call 911.

Coleman was coworker of Rivera’s, just finishing a late shift at Dodgers Stadium. Like Jenkins, they had boarded the bus at Union Station, and she also had a bad feeling about the man with the hoodie. He was restless — he didn’t sit, or look at his phone.

When asked if the shooter said anything before he opened fire, Coleman said, “I’m not sure when he said it, but he said, ‘They’re not 30 against one now!’” She later said: “I wasn’t sure who he was speaking to.”

After the shots rang out, she noticed Rivera, her supervisor, had been shot.

“Anthony never made a sound,” Coleman said.

After reloading, the shooter pointed his gun at her.

“I think he said ‘give me your things,’ that he was going to shoot me, and he didn’t care if I was his mother,” Coleman said.

She had a small taser with a strap hanging from her wrist. The gunman fired a shot near her, then snatched the taser, as well as her fanny pack.

“Were you afraid?” Deputy District Attorney Hilary Williams asked.

“I thought I was going to die,” Coleman said.

Both Jenkins and Coleman identified the shooter as Campbell, sitting at the defendant’s table wearing a brown colored standard-issue jail T-shirt and black-rimmed glasses. Curiously, when the Dennis Contreras, the bus driver, was asked if he saw the shooter in the courtroom, he looked around and said, “No.”

Contreras said he was caught completely off-guard by the shooting.

“Immediately I entered into a panic mode,” Contreras said. “I felt my life was in danger.”

The shooter came to the front of the bus, pointed the gun at the bus driver and told him to close the doors and “roll,” as in to keep driving. When the gunman turned around, Contreras said, “That’s when I pressed the emergency alert system on the bus, because he got distracted.” The hidden switch alerted the police, triggered the bus to start recording video and audio, and changed the digital sign on the front of the bus to read, “911 CALL POLICE.”

“He said he wanted to be dropped off at 96th or 98th Street,” the driver recalled. “I was in such distress, I totally forgot and I passed the street. And I thought he was gonna shoot me.”

Instead, the gunman instructed Contreras to keep driving. When he got to the end of the line, Contreras instinctively stopped the bus and opened the doors. Again, he feared the man in the hoodie would shoot him, but he didn’t. He was told again to keep “rolling,” to not stop for anything, even red lights. The shooter pointed his gun at the driver, to keep him on course. He turned the bus around and headed lazily back to Downtown LA at around 20 miles per hour. They soon heard sirens and saw flashing lights, and they knew they were being trailed by police cars. At one point, Contreras the shooter instructed to drive the wrong way on a one-way street.

By then, Contreras said, the suspect was playing music from his cell phone, and he was eating something.

Contreras said the first set of spike strips didn’t work. When he noticed the second, he slowed the bus so it would stop. Eventually, the bus could no longer keep going, and the gunman became angry.

“You’re supposed to drive this bus, move it now.” Contreras recalled the man telling him.

“So I said sir, this bus doesn’t go anymore,” Contreras said. “It’s just done. It won’t go. So he understood once the bus was shut off, the power was off. Because the bus is able to be shut off from the outside, from the back of the motor. So they shut it off. And then it was dark inside the bus.”

Contreras is set to resume testimony on Thursday, when the preliminary hearing continues. Superior Court Judge Sean Coen warned Campbell that if he refused to leave his jail cell on Thursday, the hearing would go on without him.

“This is your warning,” Coen said.

“I’ll be there,” Cambpell said.

Other than that, the defendant remained quiet throughout the hearing. He had brought with him a paperback book titled, “The Art of Inner Peace.” Campbell has been in custody since his arrest last year, in lieu of $5.75 million bail. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 90 years-to-life in prison.

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