‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!’ Jurors watch brutal Pasco bus stabbing videos

A Pasco school bus video showed a normal day outside Longfellow Elementary School in the minutes before a killer stepped onboard four years ago.

Children climbed the bus stairs, passing longtime bus driver, Richard “Dick” Lenhart. He told one student they were on the correct bus and later used the PA system to tell another to get his feet off a seat as he waited to drive them home.

Jurors watched three 10-minute videos as the first-degree murder trial of Joshua D. Davis, 38, moved into its second day of testimony on Friday. Davis has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.

The extremely graphic footage of the attack came from security cameras in the bus that turned on when the bus started.

Lenhart, 72, had about 35 children ready to go home for the weekend on Sept. 24, 2021, when Davis walked up to the closed bus doors. Lenhart opened the doors to talk with him, and Davis stepped aboard.

After Lenhart said he wasn’t driving to Road 100, Davis pulled a knife with a 3 1/2-inch blade from his pocket and lunged at him. Mid-attack, Davis paused and when he started stabbing him again, Lenhart yelled, “What’s the matter with you?”

Davis got off the bus, and Lenhart shouted into his radio, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is bus 100. I’ve been attacked at Longfellow School.”

Jurors watched for several minutes as Lenhart waited for help. His hand was pressed against his bleeding neck, and he yelled and honked the horn. In the background, children sobbed, yelled and screamed.

In all, Lenhart was stabbed 13 times.

As the video played Friday, Davis looked down at notes on the courtroom table. He has spent much of the trial appearing not to pay attention to testimony or his attorneys.

His attorneys fought most of Friday morning to try to keep the video from being shown to the jurors, suggesting they couldn’t guarantee they were the same videos from the day of the stabbing.

But after testimony from Pasco police officers and a school district employee, Judge Jackie Shea Brown allowed the video to be shown.

‘I did it!’

The video was one of the pieces of evidence that prosecutors are using to prove Davis understood what he did and that it was wrong.

Two of the school’s administrators shared what they saw that day.

Then-Vice Principal Kristen Wren testified that office staff alerted her to a problem on a bus. Outside, she approached a man in a red shirt.

“He was yelling and screaming at me, ‘I did it. I f---ing did it,’ and I don’t recall if he said he stabbed him, or he killed him. He just kept repeating that over and over,” Wren testified.

Wren, who is now principal at Captain Gray Elementary, wiped away tears as she described trying to get the students, ages 5 to 11 years old, off the bus.

“We were attempting to open the back door, to get them off of the bus,” Wren testified. “It’s not typical to have small children in the back of the bus, but that’s who was predominantly at the back of the bus, and they were attempting to keep the door closed.”

Principal Claudia Serrano testified she boarded the bus and found Lenhart bleeding.

“The students had seen me running and when I looked, they were all yelling. They were maybe upset at what happened,” she said. “It was happening so fast. I saw that he was hurt. I saw that he was bleeding. I have kids that are just screaming, and they’re panicked.”

They eventually managed to get them into the school’s library.

Davis didn’t flee and was still in the parking lot when Pasco police officers arrived.

The trial continues Monday.

The case is expected to focus on dueling forensic psychologists, who agree Davis suffered from schizophrenia, but disagree on whether he knew what he was doing and understood right from wrong at the time of the murder.

This story was originally published November 8, 2025 at 1:01 PM.