B.C. Transit investigating after alleged incident between passenger and driver in Westsyde | iNFOnews | Thompson-Okanagan's News Source
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B.C. Transit investigating after alleged incident between passenger and driver in Westsyde

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KAMLOOPS - An alleged incident involving a Kamloops bus driver and a passenger is being investigated by B.C. Transit.

Although the transit company isn't offering many details about what happened, an eyewitness to the altercation described what she saw to iNFOnews.ca.

Rochelle Collins was driving along Lyne Road in Westsyde yesterday, July 18, and was waiting to make a left turn onto Westsyde Road. While Collins was waiting for an opening to make her turn, she says she saw a B.C. Transit bus stopped in front of Westsyde Secondary School and picking people up.

"I noticed a guy running down the path toward the bus to catch it," she says.

The bus took off when the young man was roughly 10 feet away, Collins says, and he appeared to be frustrated that he had just missed the bus. Collins was hopeful when she saw the bus stop, thinking the man would be able to make it.

"All of a sudden, the bus driver launched out of his seat toward the doors," Collins claims. "My jaw was agape, I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing.”

She couldn't hear anything going on, but she says the driver was standing in the doorway and was making movements which looked to her to be intimidating, as though he was ready to fight the man outside of the bus.

Collins says she didn't see the young man do anything inappropriate when the bus drove away, but even if he had done something like hit the bus with his hand out of frustration, she says there was nothing to suggest he was a danger.

“I couldn’t see him having done anything.... Certainly nothing warranted this kind of behaviour (from the driver).”

After a tense moment between the driver and the passenger, Collins says she continued watching and saw the driver go back to his seat, while the man attempted to board the bus. According to Collins, that's when the driver allegedly "launched" toward the man again.

As a parent, Collins says she thought the passenger could have easily been a teenager who was just running for the bus and thought he didn't deserve the treatment he got. After the last altercation, Collins says the passenger left the bus and walked away.

She was able to cross the street instead of making her planned left turn, honked her horn, pulled in front of the bus and stopped. She approached the bus which still had its doors open.

"I stood in front of the open door and said 'I saw exactly what you did and don’t you dare do that to anybody else'," Collins says. "(The driver) tried to pretend that everything was cool and calm and under control.”

Collins managed to snap a picture of the driver and posted it, along with the route number and time of the incident, to a local community Facebook group after filing a complaint with B.C. Transit. One of the first comments on the post was someone who tagged a friend, stating that this is what they had seen on the bus that day.

Several people commented on the post stating they had similar issues with this particular driver in the past.

She says she doesn't usually make Facebook posts in community groups, but she wanted the passenger to know he had her support if he needed it, and she wanted to warn Westsyde neighbours of the alleged altercation.

"For me a bus driver should be a safe person for anybody," Collins says. "Whether they're fleeing abuse, whether they're trying to get to the bus on time, we don’t know what's going on in someone's life.”

Collins says one of her biggest concerns about the situation was that the bus driver didn't know who was on the other side of those doors, and engaging in an altercation could have been putting his passengers in harm's way.

She hopes people will learn from this situation to report negative interactions like this to B.C. Transit as she did.

"If this (driver's behaviour) has been going on for however long, people shouldn’t wait for this dramatic an incident to come to be," she says. "I wasn’t even on the bus."

Collins says she spoke to a supervisor at the transit company yesterday, and she was told the driver has been taken out of service for the time being, but B.C. Transit would not confirm that to iNFOnews.ca.

In an email statement, B.C. Transit says it is aware of the complaint about the alleged incident yesterday, and that it is following up with an internal investigation. According to the statement, B.C. Transit can't comment further until it has more details.

"We take complaints seriously as we want to make sure our drivers are courteous and professional at all times," the statement says. "We also expect customers to treat transit staff with respect, and if they have an issue to report it directly by email or a phone call to the local office so we can document the complaint and follow-up."

If you have further information about the alleged incident, you're asked to call the local office in Kamloops or fill out a customer comment form here.


To contact a reporter for this story, email Ashley Legassic or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. 

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