Man seriously injured in knife attack on Greyhound bus in New Mexico – weeks after a woman was fatally stabbed on a train
An Arizona man was seriously injured after being brutally attacked with a knife aboard a Greyhound bus in southern New Mexico — drawing chilling comparisons to the fatal stabbing of a young woman on a Charlotte light rail train in August.
Jorge Quintanilla was traveling from Alamogordo, New Mexico, to Old Pueblo on September 29 when another passenger suddenly lunged at him with a knife.
According to the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, 29-year-old Ryan Kenny was arrested and charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
The bus was between Lordsburg and Deming, in New Mexico, when the attack unfolded.
“I had suddenly heard somebody moving quickly on the other side of the aisle from me,” Quintanilla told KOLD. “When I looked over, it was this guy who was lunging across the aisle with what at the time I thought was a pen. And he stabbed me straight in the neck, and then after that, I was able to grab his wrist and was trying to push him off me, and in that time, he kept stabbing and jabbing, and it was more towards the head.”
Quintanilla was stabbed six times in the head, neck, and arm before other passengers restrained the attacker. He was airlifted to a hospital in El Paso, Texas, where he underwent emergency treatment.
While doctors expect him to recover, the brutal, unprovoked attack has left his family shaken — especially after a similar tragedy just weeks earlier in North Carolina. In August, 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska was fatally stabbed while riding a light rail train in Charlotte.
Her death prompted “Iryna’s Law,” which reinstates the death penalty for certain violent crimes in North Carolina.
“All day I was getting compared to her,” Quintanilla said.
“The paramedics, the cops, the nurses, the doctors, while I was at the hospital, everybody was comparing me to her, and it wasn’t until I saw the video the next day that I realized, yeah, that’s exactly how it went down, it’s pretty much exactly how it went down. Somebody just decided to grab a knife and attack me.”
Quintanilla’s sister, Adriana Velasquez, also said the attack reminded her of Zarutska’s tragic case.
“I had just seen it on TV, and I had seen it all over social media, and that was scary enough,” Velasquez told KOLD.
“The poor girl. She had no help. Nobody noticed what had happened with her attacker, and they just left her there, and so that’s the first thing that came to my mind when I thought about that too.”
Unlike Zarutska, Velasquez’s brother did have someone who jumped into action moments after the attack. And now the family is focused on finding the unidentified woman who stopped the bleeding and helped keep him alive until paramedics arrived.
