Today’s Senseless Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Seattle’s Aurora Avenue Bridge crosses the Lake Union ship canal and over the years, like many bridges, has seen its fair share of suicides, mostly people who jump off of it. On November 27, 1998, the day after Thanksgiving, another disturbed person chose the Aurora Bridge as his suicide spot, but this time, he would also commit murder. That afternoon, bus driver Mark McLaughlin, 43, was driving his articulated bus on the bridge when a passenger, Silas Cool, 43, approached him and shot him with a .380 handgun and then turned the weapon on himself. McLaughlin was mortally wounded, but managed to deliberately swerve his bus hard left across two lanes of traffic and plunge 50 feet down to land on the roof of an apartment complex. If he had not swerved in this manner, the bus would have fallen 160 feet into the lake, and everyone aboard would have been killed.
As it was, one passenger, Herman Liebelt, 69, was killed in the crash, and the other 32 passengers were injured, many severely and permanently. Silas Cool, a native of New Jersey, was an unemployed loner who lived in a squalid apartment in Seattle, paid for by his elderly parents back in New Jersey. He had no record for violent offenses, but prior to his attack on the bus, he had shown a gun to a fellow passenger on another bus and said he was going to acquire another gun to take care of some people who drove and rode buses.
On December 8, 1998, all Seattle bus service was shut down for four hours to allow a massive memorial service to be held at the Key Arena. McLaughlin’s repaired bus was present, his photo and jacket placed on the driver’s seat, adorned with a black ribbon; 32 purple ribbons graced the passenger seats to symbolize the injured, and a final seat bore a black ribbon in memory of Herman Liebelt.
Culled from: A Rage To Kill and Other True Cases: Anne Rule’s Crime Files, Vol. 6
Generously submitted by: Aimee
