A judge decided Wednesday morning that the Charlotte man who authorities say shot a CATS bus driver can’t use any public transportation in the city and will be jailed with a $250,000 bond.
Omarri Sharif Thursday, Tobias, who is 22 years old, and the bus driver got into a fight near the Charlotte Premium Outlet Mall in Steele Creek.
According to cops and a spokesperson for the Charlotte Area Transit System, both men shot at each other. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police officials said that Tobias was in the hospital for six days with injuries that could have killed him.
A CMPD news release says that he is now being charged with assault with a deadly weapon that caused major injuries, carrying a concealed firearm, and making threats.
The tweet below verifies the news:
We don’t know what started the fight and the violence.
Jail records show that this is the fifth time Tobias has been arrested in the last three years. According to the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office website, he had been charged with choking, trespassing, making threats, assaulting a woman, and driving a stolen car in the past. The last time he got out of jail was in September 2021.
It’s not clear if the bus driver, who was also taken to the hospital, will be charged, but Mecklenburg County District Court Judge Roderick Davis said Wednesday that the driver was right to defend himself.
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Violence; Safety on the CATS bus
In 2022, Ethan Rivera, a 41-year-old CATS driver, was shot and killed on his bus. According to jail records, 21-year-old Darian Dru Thavychith was charged with murder and shooting into a parked car by the police.
Police say that he started shooting because he was angry about being in a car accident.
If CATS’s planned budget for capital projects from 2024 to 2028 is approved, more than $5.5 million could be used for new cameras, better dispatch, and safety programs.
Ed Driggs, a member of the Charlotte City Council, said that this was in the CATS budget long before the shooting last week, and it’s needed.
“The safety concerns are similar to safety concerns in our city as a whole,” said Driggs, who is in charge of the city’s transportation committee. “Teenagers are shooting each other over small problems.”
The shooting on the bus is one of a number of recent events that have made people talk about gun crime locally and across the country.
- Police say that on April 18, a man in Gaston County shot at a family after a basketball rolled into his yard. A 6-year-old girl’s face had to be stitched up because of him.
- On April 24, an 8-year-old girl woke up in the middle of the night with a bullet in her head. Police said it was a drive-by shot. Officials haven’t said anything yet about why it happened. Since then, Olivia Velez has been hurt in ways that will change the rest of her life, and her family says that she has lost feeling in half of her body.
- Police say that during dinner service at Cracker Barrel on April 24, Robert Prebble dropped a semi-automatic gun. One man in the restaurant was hit in the leg by shrapnel from the stray bullet. Prebble, who is 64 and from Ohio, broke a North Carolina rule about carrying a gun on his person, but police did not arrest him. Police records show that instead, they gave him a ticket.
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