Listen Live
St Jude banner
CLOSE

AS THE SEPTA BUS pulled up to 7th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue in North Philly, two men in white T-shirts rushed up to the open back door, one whipping out a long rifle from his pants and the other holding a pistol.

A dramatic video from one of seven cameras on the Route 47 bus, shown in a packed Philadelphia courtroom yesterday, caught the horrifying image of the men, weapons drawn.

After the door closed, another camera captured the smoke from the bullets fired into the bus – streams of vapor jetting from one side of the bus to the other.

Lafenus Pickett, who had been sitting in the back of the bus, told a Municipal judge that “five or six” people were outside the bus, two with guns. One had an “automatic rifle, the other a handgun,” he said.

Just before the shooting, about 5:50 p.m. June 18, as the bus was traveling north on 7th, Pickett said, he began arguing with a woman who boarded the bus with a toddler.

“She was spanking her son for something he did,” Pickett testified, speaking of Penny Chapman, 20, one of six defendants at yesterday’s preliminary hearing.

“I said, ‘That’s child abuse.’ ”

Pickett said he then saw Chapman talk on her cellphone. When the bus stopped and Chapman got off with the boy, she said to a man outside: ” ‘Shoot that n—–,’ ” Pickett testified. Read on here

Most Popular Articles