A man accused of beheading and cannibalizing another passenger on a Greyhound bus in Canada shook his head and said “please kill me,” when a judge asked him if he wanted a lawyer on Tuesday.
Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Michel Chartier ordered Vince Weiguang Li to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Prosecutor Joyce Dalmyn, who argued for the evaluation, revealed new details about the attack, which occurred last Wednesday night.
She said Li, 40, had a plastic bag containing his victim’s ear, nose and part of a mouth in his pocket when officers arrested him.
The only response officers received from him was: “’I have to stay on the bus forever,’” Dalmyn said.
Dalmyn also said the accused carried the victim’s severed head back and forth on the bus “taunting” officers. Armed with a knife and a pair of scissors, he was also observed “cutting body parts from the victim and eating those body parts,” she said.
In an interview with police after his arrest, Li declined to speak for the most part, she said. On four occasions, however, he did indicate in a low voice that he is guilty, she said.
Police are looking into information that Li may have spent as many as four days in a psychiatric facility prior to the attack, Dalmyn said.
Li, who immigrated to Canada from China in 2004, is charged with second-degree murder in the slaying of 22-year-old carnival worker Tim McLean. He has yet to enter a plea.
He was scheduled to appear on Tuesday in court in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, to determine whether he should undergo psychiatric testing, but the judge adjourned the hearing for a short recess to allow a legal aid attorney to confer with the suspect.
Dalmyn said Li refused to work with the lawyer.
Since his arrest, Li has declined to speak to prosecutors and his court-appointed attorney.
When asked by Chartier after the recess if he wanted a lawyer, Li shook his head and then quietly said: “Please kill me.”
“There were some people in the courtroom that were taken aback by it,” Dalmyn said. “Those were the only words I heard him utter in the courtroom.”
Li is due back in court Sept. 8. Dalmyn said they hope to have the psychiatric assessment by then, and that a new lawyer could be appointed to the case after Li rejected the legal aid counsel who handled the case Tuesday.
In the wake of the attack, Greyhound scrapped a billboard ad campaign that extolled the relaxing upside of bus travel.
The ad’s punch line was “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage.’”
Greyhound spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh said the company feels the ad, launched last year, could be offensive and that it is no longer appropriate.
Beijing yesterday dismissed as “groundless speculation” a report that said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) was the target of a Chinese spy plot. The article by the New York Times, published on Thursday, said that US intelligence officials concluded that a Chinese executive linked to a Singapore-based data center company had been funneling information to Beijing. “The report in question is based on groundless speculation and is nothing more than an attempt to smear China,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun (郭嘉昆) told a regular briefing. China is in a race for tech dominance with the US, which restricts the export
Long dubbed an “air-conditioned nation,” Singapore is experimenting with cooling alternatives from chilled beams to “passive displacement” to curb its thirst for energy-guzzling air-conditioning. The city-state has the highest per-capita air-conditioner ownership rate in Southeast Asia, with about 99 percent of private residences equipped with cooling units. Singapore’s local building sector accounts for one-fifth of its emissions, while cooling itself accounts for 40 to 60 percent of a building’s energy consumption, according to studies. A stroll down Orchard Road highlights that dependence. Shoppers are greeted by blasts of cool air that waft into the street as doors swing open — a major draw
KIRIBATI: Nine people on a skiff had been reported missing after they failed to return to Ruo Island in Micronesia on July 30. Four people remained missing Five people, including two children, were rescued this week in the South Pacific island nation of Kiribati after three months drifting at sea in a 20-foot (6m) skiff, authorities said. Another four remained missing. Villagers rescued the group on Sunday off Fanning Island in Kiribati, the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) reported, after they had drifted an estimated 5,400km east from the Federated States of Micronesia. The US Coast Guard in Guam yesterday confirmed that the skiff with nine people aboard had been reported missing after it failed to return to Ruo Island in Micronesia on July 30. 10-DAY SEARCH A 10-day search covering
33 MISSING: The unprecedented number of empty seats at the fifth plenum, an annual gathering of top officials, serve as a symbol of the extent of the purges under Xi Jinping China expelled a record number of officials from the Chinese Communist party (CCP) as it concluded a major political gathering, which saw an unprecedented number of empty seats indicating the scale of the purges under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). A record 33 members were expelled at this week’s fifth plenum, a gathering of top officials that takes place roughly once a year. Just 279 of the full and alternate members of the CCP’s Central Committee attended this week’s gathering, compared with the 376 originally named as members in 2022. That means that more than 25 percent of the original cohort were
RSS