On 30 July 2008, Tim McLean, a 22-year-old Canadian man, was stabbed, beheaded, and cannibalized while riding a Greyhound Canada bus along the Trans-Canada Highway, about 30 km (19 mi) west of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.
On 5 March 2009, his killer, 40-year-old Vince Li, was found not criminally responsible for murder, after it was determined that he was schizophrenic, and remanded to a high-security mental health facility in Selkirk, Manitoba, where he was detained until his release on 8 May 2015.
[5][6] Li, described as a tall man in his 40s, with a shaved head and sunglasses, first sat near the front of the bus, then moved to sit next to McLean after a scheduled rest stop in Brandon.
[7] According to witnesses, McLean was sleeping with his headphones on when the man sitting next to him suddenly produced a large knife and began stabbing him in the neck and chest.
[5] At 8:30 p.m., the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Portage la Prairie received a report of a stabbing on a Greyhound bus west of the city.
Parts of the victim's body, placed in plastic bags, were retrieved from the bus; his ear, nose, and tongue were found in Li's pockets.
He was born one month premature, and it was noted by psychiatrists in his youth that Li was very sickly throughout most of his childhood and exhibited developmental delays, learning to walk and talk only at around five years old and starting elementary school at age nine.
According to Li's wife and family, he displayed no signs of mental illness, although his father noted that his son was "stubborn and restless" and had a tendency for "always moving around".
[14] Li immigrated to Canada on 11 June 2001[15][16][17] (though some newspapers mistakenly reported 2004)[18] as part of the Federal Skilled Worker Program,[5] and remained a Chinese national until he became a Canadian citizen on 7 November 2006.
According to Stanley Yaren, his court psychiatrist, Li told him that he had converted to Christianity and was baptised during his employment at Grant Memorial Church, after he heard the "voice of God" talking to him.
In preparation, the voice would regularly order Li to travel through the country on foot or by bus, often disappearing from his home for days on end, as corroborated by his wife.
[9] Due to his paranoid belief that he was constantly under threat by alien infiltrators, Li began carrying a buck knife on his person for protection.
[14] The couple subsequently separated in March 2005, leading Li to leave for Thompson, initially planning to buy land, but after realizing that he had no money, he instead began working as an overnight maintenance worker at a local Wal-Mart.
Four months later, Li saved up enough to move back to Winnipeg, where he briefly worked as a gas station attendant for Domo and part-time at a Tim Hortons.
[23][24] After Li checked himself out of the clinic, against the advice of doctors who wanted him to stay for a month for continued observation, he called his wife and asked her to book him a flight back to Dandong.
There, his parents noticed their son's change in personality and that although Li found work easily, he was unable to stay employed for longer than a few days due to his sudden irritability.
[5] When he appeared in a Portage la Prairie courthouse on charges of second-degree murder, the only words Li reportedly uttered were "Please kill me".
[28] Stanley Yaren said that his patient's schizophrenia rendered him inculpable, as he had been under the false belief that McLean was a "force of evil" and posed an imminent threat to himself and others.
[21][29][30] Both the defense and the prosecution were in agreement with Yaren's assessment and spoke in favour of involuntary commitment to a mental institution rather than prison time.
[32] The week following the attack, Greyhound Canada announced it was pulling a series of nationwide advertisements which included the slogan, "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage."
[33] Vincent (Cider Press, 2015), a book-length poem by American poet Joseph Fasano, is a fictionalized work based loosely on the event.