I hadn’t thought about suitcases being in an overhead rack. Do they do that on buses? I’ve always pictured the luggage in the undercarriage bins. I’ve never taken a trip on a commercial bus line before.
"He sat in the front at first, everything was normal," Caton said. "We went to the next stop and he got off and had a smoke with another young lady there. When he got on the bus again, he came to the back near where I was sitting. "He put his bags in the overhead compartment. He didn't say a word to anybody. He seemed totally normal," Caton said.
Presumably, given that there were overhead compartments, the perp's bags weren't the only ones up there. I would assume that large suitcases were in an undercarriage cargo space. While a couple of passengers pummeled the perp with bags from the overhead bins, other passengers could have been passing up larger suitcases for the follow-up offensive.
Obviously hindsight is 20-20. It's a lot easier to figure out what COULD have been done, while sitting at a computer reading an article about what happened, than to figure it out on the spot while you're watching a fellow passenger getting butchered. But I do think it's a useful exercise to think through as fast as possible, what could have been done. The more of us who read stories like this and think through what COULD have been done, and the more people who read other people's ideas about what COULD have been done, the better chance that the next incident will have one or more bystanders who quickly thinks through what CAN be done and does it (enlisting others quickly if possible).
I conduct such exercises fairly regularly as I go about my daily business. When I'm standing on a subway platform in NYC, where there have been a number of instances of crazies shoving somebody onto the track just as a train is pulling in, and other sorts of attacks, I check the drainage channel between the tracks. Is the channel deep enough at this point to lie down in while a train goes over you? Because that's generally a much better option than standing up and trying to climb back onto the platform before the train hits you. Is it deep enough for two people? IOW, if someone next to me is pushed onto the track (especially a child who probably won't quickly follow a screamed instruction to "lie down between the tracks!"), if I jump down and lie on top of the person, will we both be safe? If I'm in a taxi at a stoplight, I try to figure out what I'd do if somebody tried to break into the car at a stoplight, or (not really in NYC, where taxi drivers are pretty tighly regulated and screened) what I'd do if the the driver suddenly started taking me someplace other than where I'd asked to go.
We all need to be polishing our "Let's roll!" mindset at every opportunity.