JAMAICA Urban Transit Company (JUTC) buses will roll again today — but crews say that they are likely to be in fear after Sunday night’s mob slaying of a driver on Mountain View Avenue in the eastern end of Kingston.

In fact, JUTC buses have been re-routed so that they do not have to travel along that stretch of Mountain View Avenue, between Langston Road and Deanery Avenue, where Harold Collins, 32, was reportedly dragged off his Number 83 bus, beaten, slashed and allegedly stabbed nearly 60 times. His throat was also cut.

Angry JUTC crew members struck in protest yesterday, causing serious problems for the capital’s tens of thousands of commuters.

They agreed to today’s return after a long meeting attended by the president of the University and Allied Workers Union (UAWU), Professor Trevor Munroe; Transport Minister Bobby Pickersgill; and JUTC managers.

They were also promised increased police protection and checks of JUTC buses by police official, Superintendent Dwight Amos.

“I don’t want to be killed,” lamented a conductress, who would give only her first name, Patsy. “I don’t want to go back around there (Mountain View Avenue). We all have our children to live for.”

The conductress who was working with Collins was traumatised by the event and had to spend Sunday night in hospital under observation. She was released yesterday.

Just what triggered the mauling and murder of Collins remained imprecise last night.

The Constabulary Communication Network (CCN), the police’s information agency, reported that Collins got into an argument with a male passenger, Tegreary Cowell, 21, which led to a fight on the road between both men.

According to the police’s account of the incident, when Collins re-entered the bus and was driving away, the bus was stoned. He lost control of the vehicle, which hit Cowell. It was then that Collins was dragged from the bus and set upon by the mob.

But that account was, in part, at odds with what JUTC employees claimed to have happened.

According to their version of events, a group of men asked Collins to let them off between bus stops. He refused.

That was what, the employees said, caused the dispute that led to Collins being hit on the head with a stone by one of the men after he had stopped and started to drive again, causing the bus to get out of control and hit Cowell.

“I know him (Collins) for two years,” said conductress Sonia Beckford-Brown. “He was a very nice person — very jovial, very willing.”

Beckford-Brown was among Collins’ colleagues who said that it would have been unlike him to get into an argument with a passenger.

“This is brutal man. Brutal,” said Paul Smith, a conductor and chief union delegate at the JUTC. “He is a family man, not a man who is going to fight on the bus.”

Collins has three children — Lorenzo, 10; Shamar, 5; and Shanice, 2. Yesterday, their mother, Sandra Lovelace, traumatised and heavily sedated, could not speak.

His mother, Rhona Collins, however, had a word for the killers of her second son.

“I wouldn’t do them nothing of myself but put it in the hands of the Lord. I leave them to God,” she said.

Yesterday, Colin Campbell, the member of Parliament for Eastern Kingston, condemned Collins’ murder and described it as “savage and barbaric”. He extended condolences to the bus driver’s family and colleagues and urged anyone with information on the killing to talk to the police.

Collins is the second JUTC bus driver killed so far this year while on the job.

In April, Wilfred Gayle, was shot dead by a motor cyclist along Molynes Road after he had been in an accident with the shooter’s colleague, who died.

In the wake of that incident, the police promised stepped-up plain clothes patrols on the buses. It happened for a few weeks, the workers claimed yesterday, but soon fell off.

Amos said that the surveillance still takes place, but conceded that it may not be happening as often as it should.

Yesterday, the UAWU was proposing another tact: getting the communities involved.

According to Munroe, a meeting was being set up between the political ombudsman, Bishop Herro Blair, and area leaders within the community where Sunday’s attack took place.