A 24-year-old man was arrested after attacking a BART passenger with a knife and stealing the passenger’s backpack on a train in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday morning, officials said.
BART police said that the suspect was booked at the Santa Rita Jail on multiple charges, including assault with a deadly weapon and robbery.
The suspect stabbed the 25-year-old male passenger with “a cleaver-style knife” as the man was running away on an Antioch-bound train traveling through the Transbay Tube, police said. At the West Oakland station, the suspect ran off the train with the backpack.
BART police officers stopped him, recovering the knife and the backpack, the report said.
The passenger had non-life-threatening injuries and was taken to a local hospital, according to the transit agency.
Mission Local was the first to report on the attack; the news site described the knife as a meat cleaver and said the suspect was wearing a balaclava.
The news of the attack comes a day after the Bay Area Council released a survey revealing that safety was a concern for people when it came to taking BART. Bay Area residents want “more aggressive action to make BART safer and cleaner, including hiring more [uniformed] police officers and installing more secure fare gates,” the Bay Area Council posted on Twitter.
In March, BART police doubled the number of sworn officers patrolling trains in response to safety concerns. “That means an additional eight to 18 officers per shift are patrolling trains in BART’s core service area,” the department said.
This breaking news story has been updated.
