WINNIPEG, CANADA — Sleep hasn't come easy to freelance music agent Joseph Egan since that Halloween bus ride on the lonely rural highways of western Canada.
Three months after a sleeping passenger had been beheaded by his seatmate on the same prairies west of Winnipeg, Egan was confronted by a drunken woman behind him. He rose and started walking toward the driver.
"I got three steps, and she goes, 'You go to the driver, I'm going to cut your . . . head off,' " he recalled. "I started wondering: copycat? That's the first thing that went through my mind. It's just the newest thing, beheading somebody on a bus. It's disturbing that somebody's mind would even go there."
He managed to alert the driver, and no one was hurt. But he's haunted by the experience. "I've only now started to resume normal sleep patterns."
A horrifying string of stabbings and threats on intercity buses has prompted Greyhound Lines Inc. to roll out stepped-up security screening at terminals across Canada.
The measures, even stricter than most of those the company adopted in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, include a ban on most hand-held luggage, hand searches of any items carried on board and magnetic screening of all passengers at the terminals.
The heightened passenger screening debuted this month at bus stations in Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary, and will be expanded Monday to include all major intercity bus terminals across Canada.
"These additional security measures follow a comprehensive two-year study we completed as well as a complete review of all our security measures that were in place in Canada," company spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh said. "We implemented those that we felt were most effective and most practical for the network system of transportation we have."
The new security measures follow months of demands from passengers, family members, drivers and others to prevent the potentially deadly mix of alcohol, weapons and remote roads that can leave drivers with little means of protecting their passengers from acts of random and sometimes shocking violence.
At least three people have been stabbed on intercity buses in Canada since last December, and a bus driver was attacked in Lloydminster, Alberta, in February 2007 by a group of young men who had thrown something in front of the bus to bring it to a halt.
The real outcry began in July, when Timothy McLean, a 22-year-old carnival worker, was attacked as he slept on a Greyhound bus about 45 miles west of Winnipeg.
