Robin Thick

BREAKING — new details about Friday's Austin bus stabbing. Two passengers were sitting in the back of the #3 bus on South Lamar, having a Bible discussion. Rogerio Martinez, sitting across from them, apparently found this annoying. "I'm tired of hearing your voice,” Martinez said. Then he stood up with a kitchen knife. One was mid-conversation, turned away, when the first blade went into his back. He spun around and threw up his bare hands -- Martinez kept stabbing. Four times total. A stranger named jumped in, pushed Martinez off, and wrestled him into a bus seat. Martinez stabbed him in the leg anyway. Bleeding, the man held him pinned to the seat until police arrived. Officers found Martinez still on the bus, blood on his hands and shirt, surrounded by people he'd just put on the ground. He refused to talk. One victim was transported to Dell Seton in critical condition. The other to South Austin Hospital. Surveillance footage captured all of it. Martinez -- who was named as the suspect yesterday on this account before local news reported it today -- has spent decades cycling through Texas courtrooms: robbing people, strangling a family member, and most recently beating an HEB security guard in the forehead with her own flashlight. Four aggravated robbery charges, a family strangulation, a felony assault knocked to a misdemeanor -- and every time, a system that found a reason to put him back on the street. Two people are in the hospital now because prosecutors apparently never attempted to take him to court and face punishment for his crimes.