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 Las Vegas bus driver ignored a passenger’s cries for help and refused to pull over for four minutes as the rider — who had cognitive disabilities and was shouting “let me off, let me off” — was being stabbed to death, a lawsuit said.
The family of 30-year-old Dominique Lucas, who was killed on a Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC) bus in 2023, sued the bus agency, its operating company at the time, Keolis, and the driver, Marvin Scott, following his death. The parties agreed to settle the wrongful death lawsuit last week, according to local CBS affiliate KLAS.
“He wanted to be let off the bus,” said Donniesha Lucas, Dominique’s sister, in an interview with KLAS in March 2023.
Dominique Lucas was murdered on Feb. 26, 2023, by 62-year-old Aaron Cole in a stabbing attack that was caught on surveillance video, according to police. Lucas was taking the bus to his job as a dishwasher.
After randomly threatening him, Cole began “violently stabbing” Lucas repeatedly, including numerous times while he was “laying on the floor directly next to Defendant Scott pleading for help,” the legal complaint said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It allegedly took the bus driver at least four minutes before he stopped the city vehicle, surveillance video showed.
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.
