Town note
Evidence of people living in the area for the last 12,000 years has been found.
about 0:05:09The story
In Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, a city of about 13,000 people on the plains between North Dakota and Minnesota, the episode tells the story of a killing that took place on a Greyhound bus passing through the region in the summer of 2008.
He graduated from the Wuhan Institute of Technology in 1992 with a bachelor of science in computers, worked as a software engineer in Beijing from 1994 to 1998, and studied English with the aim of emigrating to Canada. He married a woman named Anna in China in 1995 and came to Canada on 11 June 2001, later becoming a Canadian citizen on 7 November 2006. The couple found a home near downtown Winnipeg, where he worked as a forklift driver and Anna waited tables in Chinese restaurants. They began attending a Baptist church, Grant Memorial Church, partly to meet people, and he took a second job there as night custodian. In 2006 they moved to Edmonton, where he worked at Walmart, at McDonald's and delivering newspapers, and where he was fired from Walmart about four weeks before the bus trip after an argument with other employees.
Timothy Richard McLean was twenty-two, a carnival worker known to his friends as Tiny Tim, and was returning to Manitoba after working at Edmonton's Capital Expo, with a job at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition lined up. His girlfriend was about four months pregnant. On 30 July 2008 he was asleep by the window in the back row of Greyhound bus 1170, one row from the toilet, as it travelled from Edmonton to Winnipeg.
Li had started his journey on 29 July, getting off the bus in Erickson, Manitoba, about six in the evening with at least three pieces of luggage. He spent the night on a bench next to a grocery store, was seen at three in the morning sitting upright with his eyes open, and the next morning sold his fairly new laptop to a fifteen-year-old boy, Darren Beady, for sixty dollars. At 6.55 p.m. on 30 July he boarded the bus at Erickson. He first sat at the front, then moved to the back after a rest stop and sat near McLean. The two had never spoken. McLean put on his headphones, leaned against the window and fell asleep.
Without warning Li stood up, pulled out a large knife and stabbed McLean repeatedly in the neck and throat. A passenger in front of them, Garrett Katan, heard a blood-curdling scream and turned to see Li stabbing the sleeping man with what he called a Rambo knife. McLean fought back, but Li kept stabbing, then sawed his head off. The bus driver pulled over and the passengers ran; a long-haul truck driver, Christopher Alguire, stopped his truck, took a metal bar and boarded the bus with the driver, but retreated when Li came down the aisle holding the head. He went back to the body, cut off more parts and ate them.
Police arrived at about 8.30 p.m., and by nine o'clock negotiators and a heavily armed tactical unit were in a standoff with him. He paced the bus, returned to the body to cut and eat pieces in front of the officers, and told them, "I have to stay on the bus forever." McLean's heart and eyes were never found. The other passengers were taken to a local mall to replace their clothes and reached Winnipeg at 3.30 p.m. the next day.
He was sent for a psychological assessment. The judge accepted the diagnosis and ruled him not criminally responsible, remanding him to a mental health centre with an annual review.
McLean's mother said she never wanted him walking free and would attend every hearing. In June 2010 he was granted supervised outdoor walks on the hospital grounds with two escorts, and his doctor said a release within five years was not unrealistic. In May 2012 he gave an interview saying he had bought the knife for protection from aliens. In February 2017 the review board found that the evidence did not show he posed a significant threat to public safety and gave him an absolute discharge. He changed his name to Will Baker. The McLean family said they were trying to move on but would never get over it.