A San Antonio woman is facing charges of aggravated assault after police say she stabbed an 80-year-old woman on a Greyhound bus for not speaking English.
According to KCEN, Reshunda Denise Pickens, 32, is currently being held on $10,000 bond.
According to authorities, at around 12:30 a.m. June 12, Pickens was sitting next to the older victim on the Greyhound bus. Pickens had moved to try to ask the woman questions, according to Bruceville-Eddy, Texas, Police Chief Bill McLean. However, the older woman, who is Hispanic, did not speak English. Pickens, according to McLean, grew frustrated that the woman was not answering her questions and stabbed the woman three to four times in the abdomen and back with a 4-1/2-inch knife.
I’m not sure why she felt that the woman should be made to answer her even if she could speak English, yet here we are.
The older woman was taken to a hospital, where she was reported to be in stable condition.
KCEN later identified the 80-year-old as Irene Murillo. Family say that the woman is afraid to travel on airplanes and preferred to travel by bus before the attack.
“I was very upset,” Murillo’s granddaughter told the news station. “If she wanted to hurt someone, she needed to go ahead and hurt somebody else—not my grandma. But after talking to my grandma, we decided to forgive her.”
“She said she holds no hate against [Pickens] and told us, ‘God forgive her because she didn’t know what she was doing,’” Murillo’s granddaughter said.