ATLANTA—A woman with a knife stabbed a taxi driver as he was driving down an interstate and then slashed an airline employee and a police lieutenant at the Atlanta airport before she was tackled by another officer, according to a police report.
The 44-year-old woman was arrested and charged with four counts of aggravated assault. She was being held in the Clayton County Jail and was denied bond during an initial court appearance Thursday, according to online court records. The records did not list an attorney who could comment on the charges.
The taxi driver told police he picked the woman up at a MARTA train station Wednesday afternoon and she asked to be taken to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. As he drove down Interstate 285, not far from the airport, the woman stabbed him in the upper chest, near his right shoulder. Then she grabbed his phone and threw it out the window, he told police.
At the airport, someone told an Atlanta police officer that there was a woman with a knife. The officer used his radio to alert other officers and two of them spotted her. They began to follow her and one of them saw her “swipe her knife” at a Delta Air Lines employee, cutting her on the left side of her chest, the report says.
The officer fired his Taser, but it hit the woman’s pants leg and didn’t make contact with her skin. The woman did not obey commands to drop the knife, and another officer fired his Taser at her, but the report says it’s not clear if its prongs hit the woman.
A police lieutenant sprayed his pepper spray at the woman, but then slipped on the spray on the ground. The woman bent down and stabbed him in the left leg, the report says. Another officer then tackled the woman, who was still armed with the knife.
Once the woman was in custody, an officer put a tourniquet on the police lieutenant’s leg and another applied a chest seal to the taxi driver’s chest to stop the bleeding. The police lieutenant, the taxi driver, and the Delta employee were all taken to hospitals for treatment.
Atlanta police said Thursday that the police lieutenant had been discharged from a hospital and was recovering. They said they would increase patrols throughout the airport.