Now we know the woman who received the uppercut that was seen around the world, she is Shi’dea Lane, 25. Artis Hughes, 59, is the Cleveland bus driver who delivered the infamous punch.
The shocking tape of Hughes, the male bus driver upper-cutting the Lane does not appear to tell the whole story, not at least to what witnesses told police after the incident.
Here’s an excerpt from the official police report from The Smoking Gun:
Hughes said that after Lane, a restaurant employee, eventually paid her fare, she told him, “You a B-tch and Your Momma’s a B-tch Too!” She also reportedly stated, “Keep talking about me and I will spit on you!”
In a written statement, Hughes recalled that Lane “grabbed me in the throat and spit on me in the face.” In response, the driver said he stopped the bus, “and I protected myself.” The Hughes statement does not reveal that he hit Lane squarely in the jaw with a bolo punch that knocked her to the ground.
One witness told cops that a “drunk” Lane “got on the bus flipping out” and “started talking crazy” to Hughes. After spitting on Hughes, the witness wrote in a statement, the driver “did what he had to do.”
A second witness wrote that Lane was “loud and obnoxious” from the start, and spit on Hughes and “started hitting him.” The witness added, “That’s when he hit her back.” A third witness described Lane as “drunk” and reported that “she hit him and he jumped out of his seat and started fighting her.”
