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Left inset: Dominique Lucas (GoFundMe). Right inset: Aaron Cole (Clark County Sheriff’s Office). Background: Las Vegas bus driver Marvin Scott allegedly driving down the road while Dominique Lucas was being stabbed to death by Aaron Cole (KLAS/YouTube).
A tragic incident unfolded on a Las Vegas bus when the driver ignored urgent pleas for help from a passenger with cognitive disabilities. The passenger, who was repeatedly shouting “let me off, let me off,” was being fatally stabbed during the ordeal, as detailed in a lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed by the family of 30-year-old Dominique Lucas, who tragically lost his life on a bus operated by the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC) in 2023. The defendants included the RTC, its former operator Keolis, and the bus driver, Marvin Scott. Recently, the involved parties reached a settlement in this wrongful death case, reported by local CBS affiliate KLAS.
Donniesha Lucas, Dominique’s sister, shared her grief in a March 2023 interview with KLAS, stating, “He wanted to be let off the bus.”
The attack occurred on February 26, 2023, when Aaron Cole, 62, launched a fatal stabbing assault on Dominique Lucas, which was captured on surveillance footage. Lucas was en route to his job as a dishwasher when the tragedy struck.
According to the legal complaint, Cole threatened Lucas without provocation and then began “violently stabbing” him multiple times. Disturbingly, this occurred while Lucas lay on the floor near driver Marvin Scott, desperately pleading for help. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the bus driver took at least four minutes to stop the vehicle, as shown by the surveillance footage.
For two of those minutes, Lucas stumbled toward the front of the bus as Scott continued driving it down Paradise Road in Las Vegas. Scott later said he didn’t want Cole to flee and hurt somebody else, nor did he want Lucas to run out into traffic, according to KLAS.
“Let me off, let me off!” Lucas can be heard screaming on video in the front of the bus as Scott continued to cruise down the road, KLAS reports.
“It appeared that the driver had ample opportunity on multiple occasions to move over immediately to his right and park along the curb,” Robert Berkstresser, a transportation consultant with nearly five decades of experience, told the TV station.
“Why was he not let off the bus?” asked Donniesha Lucas during her interview with KLAS in March 2023. “He didn’t deserve that.”
In his family’s legal complaint, their lawyers wrote that Scott “knew or should have known that a physical altercation was likely to occur” after he heard Cole “verbally accosting” Dominique Lucas prior to him attacking him. “Yet [Scott] failed to take action to prevent the assault and/or promote safety on the bus,” the complaint concluded.
A spokesperson for Keolis confirmed to KLAS after the stabbing that Scott didn’t open the bus doors due to the risk of the victim or passengers running into traffic. Keolis did not respond to Law&Crime’s requests for comment Thursday. They also said that the bus would not have been able to move if the doors were opened.
The Lucas family’s lawsuit accused RTC and Keolis of “failing to employ adequate safety measures to protect passengers and the public, despite being repeatedly informed about the dangerous environments on their buses, including, but not limited to, numerous prior incidents involving assault, battery, weapons, physical confrontation, violence, death, and use of illicit drugs known to be associated with violence.”
Cole, who is charged with open murder with a deadly weapon, is scheduled to go on trial in September for the alleged attack. Prosecutors have said that they intend to seek the death penalty, should Cole be convicted.