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Doug Clark: Meet the cop who shot that Greyhound bus 25 years ago
Idaho State Police Detective Sean Daly has logged a quarter century of investigating crimes and car crashes, writing citations and making arrests.
You’d think all the dues paying would elevate this 48-year-old lawman to the pinnacle of his profession.
And it has – except for one thing. Every now and then some smartass cop sticks the needle in Daly by asking:
“Are you the guy who killed the bus?”
Nobody outruns a legend. Fortunately for our purposes today, Daly has stopped trying. In a confessional mood, the detective asked if I’d enjoy hearing him unburden himself about the time he bagged a Greyhound bus with a shotgun.
Call me Father Doug.
I was lucky enough to report on the wild events of Feb. 5, 1981. What happened is one of my all-time favorite news stories. Until today, however, Daly’s name has never been associated with the subject in the press. Though his comrades never let him forget it, Daly’s former role as an undercover officer spared him from the public eye.
Here’s the scoop.
Believing a Greyhound was hijacked by killers, a convoy of North Idaho cop cars converged on the Spokane-bound bus and its 19 unsuspecting passengers near Post Falls.
“I was happy and headed for home and then all hell broke loose,” bus driver Charlie Justus later told me.
There was no hijacking, of course. It was all a horrible hoax.
Unfortunately, this fact wasn’t discovered until after Daly blew out one of the Greyhound’s front tires.
“After 25 years this is probably the first time I’ve ever laughed about it,” Daly told me on a bright Monday morning. “This got to be a pretty dark subject in my career.”
Daly and I sat across from each other in a cheery breakfast joint in Post Falls, not too far away from the spot on Interstate 90 where the deed was done.
The detective is trim and clear-eyed with a full head of brown hair. The night he pulled the trigger, well, he looked more like something a cat buried.
That was by design, of course. You can’t work a drug task force looking like Ryan Seacrest.
The trouble came from a raving passenger the driver had been forced to let off in Wallace. The man was a former mental patient. On delusional overload, the man told the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office that armed hijackers had taken over the bus.
Police radios crackled and the caravan was soon on.
A long line of police cruisers followed the bus until it neared Post Falls. Then the call came to take it down.
Daly, dressed like a derelict, sat in an unmarked car with another undercover officer. The two drove ahead of the bus and began slowing down.
Thinking this was the real deal had Daly’s heart thumping.
“I knew I was going to see my brains splattered on the windshield. And I wondered if you see them splatter on the windshield before you die.”
Soon a curious chain reaction followed:
1. The unmarked Malibu stopped. 2. Daly jumped out with weapon in hand. 3. Justus, seeing a shotgun-wielding hippie, dived for cover. 4. The bus, with nobody manning the helm, lurched forward.
“Ka-thoom! Ka-thoom!” blasted Daly, taking out a front tire.
A rear tire-ectomy was performed by ISP Lt. Dick Skinner and a handgun.
Two little girls and two women were first to emerge, their shaking hands in the air.
You can see why Daly didn’t talk about this much. “It was 10 years before I told my wife,” he conceded.
America was a more reasonable time back then. Greyhound agreed to pay for new tires. The ISP picked up the tab for bus damage. Aside from law enforcement egos, nothing was wounded.
Had this happened in 2006 instead of 1981, well, there’s no doubt in the detective’s mind how his bus bagging would have turned out. “There would have been 19 people in a class-action suit.”