Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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Tonya Papanikolas Reporting A Greyhound bus ends up in oncoming traffic as a man on board grabs the steering wheel.
Police say they don't know why the man tried to struggle with the bus driver, other than the fact he wanted to get off the bus. Now that man faces felony charges of hijacking a bus.
It was a scary day for passengers on board.
Florence Levao, Bus Passenger: "Right now I'm still panicked. I'm nervous."
While the bus was driving through Utah County, one of the passengers asked the bus driver to make an unscheduled stop and drop him off. When the driver told him no and to stand back, passengers say he got defensive.
Florence Levao: "'You going to shoot me?' He said that. 'Okay.' Then he commented, 'I have a gun, too.' He said that."
Florence Levao says the man started looking around, making her nervous. Then he acted.
Passenger: "All of the sudden he just jumped out of his seat, broke in through the partition over there, grabbed the wheel."
A man saw the struggle and tried to jump in.
Passenger: "I tried to grab ahold of him while he was grabbing onto the steering wheel. I tried to grab him from behind."
But the bus was already headed across the freeway into oncoming traffic. Luckily, three cables attached to the metal posts in the median acted as a safety net. As the bus went through them into the first lane of traffic, the cables pulled it to a stop.
Florence Levao: "Those cables saved us, because the bus would have just gone straight to the other side. We would have turned over."
Passenger: "Luckily we didn't hit anything. I might have went through the windshield."
As the bus stopped, the man who'd grabbed the wheel jumped off.
Passenger: "He left, running."
A half hour later, police found the suspect -- Jared Franklin -- in a nearby field and arrested him. Eventually the passengers were transferred to another bus, but they were still shaken up.
Florence Levao: "If there was traffic, a lot of traffic, could have been a bad, traumatic accident."
But thankfully, there wasn't. No one was seriously hurt.
The passengers we talked to said the bus driver didn't have a way of communicating with police, so a few of them had to call 911 on their cell phones.
