SAN ANTONIO — Still tender and close to tears, MA Sterling talked about being trapped on a bus Thursday night with an angry knife-wielding man who authorities say stabbed a fellow passenger in the neck.
Fighting to maintain his composure, Sterling said, "It was bad. I'm sorry, it was bad!"
Sterling said he was on a Greyhound bus headed for downtown San Antonio when he heard a commotion. Suddenly, a young woman stumbled to the front, bleeding from her neck.
He said he didn’t fully understand what was going on until he saw blood spilling on the floor.
"I saw her holding her mask to her neck and I was like, 'Oh dear God! He stabbed her in the neck!'"
Sterling said the woman was shocked that she was attacked by someone she didn’t even know, for no apparent reason.
“I hear, 'Oh my God, this man just stabbed me in my neck. I don't even know him.'" Sterling recalled the woman saying when she asked for help.
Sterling said the man who attacked the woman was near the back of the bus, and his behavior scared everyone on board.
"He starts yelling about killing everybody else on the bus," Sterling said, adding, “nobody knew what to do because we were afraid if we moved he would go after them.”
Sterling said his fellow passengers reacted in a variety of ways to the man who was obviously in distress.
“One man was speaking to him in Spanish and saying, 'You've already done this. Don't make it worse,'" Sterling said.
Another man, who happened to be traveling with hand tools, had a different approach and wanted to threaten the armed man with a physical attack. But Sterling said other passengers urged everyone to remain calm.
Sterling said as the bus exited the freeway and headed for the Greyhound station, they became stuck in heavy traffic on East Travis Street near Travis Park. That’s when Sterling said passengers saw Park Police officers standing nearby and they started begging for help.
“People saw police and started banging on the windows,” Sterling said, adding that the first person off the bus when the driver opened the door was the man with a shiny metal tool in his hand.
“This could have been much, much worse,” Sterling said, if police had reacted too quickly and gone after the wrong man.
Sterling said, “We started yelling, 'He's in the back, he's got a knife, he's got a knife,' and they had guns drawn and we kept saying, ‘It's not him, don’t shoot!' But he had a shiny silver piece of metal and he was a Black guy, so my demographics kicked in my head.”
While some worked to administer first aid to the stabbing victim, Sterling said he remains grateful police didn’t use deadly force against a man carrying a wrench.
“If they had shot him mistakenly? He's on the steps of the bus and we are trapped between that and a madman in the back of the bus with a knife threatening to kill us all!” Sterling said.
Sterling has nothing but praise for how officers saved everyone, including the knife-wielding man.
"San Antonio Police Department? Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!”
Sterling said after all the passengers gave statements, the woman who had been stabbed returned to say she was okay.
San Antonio Police are charging a 32-year-old man who remains hospitalized for self-inflicted wounds.
Sterling remains in gratitude.
“We're supposed to care about each other. Sometimes we have to care for each other and that's what happened yesterday,” Sterling said.
Sterling said as a person of faith, he was relieved he could help his fellow passengers get to safety.
"I thank God for being able to be the calm in the middle of the storm," Sterling said. “You step out in faith every day. You just keep stepping and no matter what happens you just have to keep stepping in that direction.”