A Bus Driver Turned Him Away for Carrying a Machete — So He Used It to Smash the Bus, Prosecutors Say.

Shortly after midnight on July 2, 2026, a man carrying a machete strapped to his chest tried to board a King County Metro Route 7 bus at Fourth Avenue South and South Jackson Street, in the heart of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. The driver recognized him — from an earlier encounter in which he had allegedly damaged the same bus’s front door — and refused to let him on because he was armed.

According to King County charging documents, the man responded by swinging the machete into the bus itself, shattering two side windows and cracking the front windshield, and forcing the coach out of service. Deputies arrested him nearby; he admitted to the damage, and officers recovered the machete. Prosecutors have charged Daniel Damien Lee Couch with malicious mischief and asked a judge to hold him on $30,000 bail.

It is, on its face, a single bus and a single broken windshield. But it happened at the single intersection King County has already spent two years and millions of dollars trying to fix — one block from a mass stabbing that shut down these same bus stops for nearly four months, and about two weeks after Seattle’s new mayor announced yet another plan to clean the corridor up. This page lays out what prosecutors allege, what is and isn’t known about the defendant, and why this one machete fits a pattern the city has been unable to break.

• $30,000 — bail King County prosecutors requested for Daniel Damien Lee Couch after he allegedly shattered two bus windows and cracked a windshield with a machete · Source: KOMO News; Northwest Asian Weekly
• 2 windows, 1 windshield — the damage that forced a Route 7 King County Metro bus out of service near Fourth Avenue South and South Jackson Street early July 2, 2026 · Source: KOMO News
• Malicious mischief — degree disputed — KOMO News reported the charge as second-degree; Northwest Asian Weekly reported first-degree, a class B felony; Washington law makes interrupting public-transit service a first-degree offense · Source: KOMO News; NW Asian Weekly; RCW 9A.48.070
• 5 people stabbed, Nov. 8, 2024 — the last mass-casualty attack one block away at 12th and Jackson, which shut down these same Route 7 bus stops for nearly four months · Source: KOMO News
• $1.1 million — one-time city funding Mayor Katie Wilson (D-Seattle) committed to the 12th and Jackson corridor about two weeks before this bus was attacked · Source: KOMO News; Office of the Mayor

The Route 7 is one of King County Metro’s busiest lines, running from downtown Seattle through the Chinatown-International District and Rainier Valley. Charging documents say the driver who pulled up to the stop at Fourth and Jackson just after midnight on July 2 recognized the man waiting to board: the same driver had encountered him before, in an incident in which he allegedly damaged the bus’s front door. This time, with a machete visibly strapped to his chest, the driver refused him entry.

According to prosecutors, the man did not walk away. He allegedly used the machete to shatter two of the bus’s side windows and crack the front windshield, disabling the coach and forcing King County Metro to pull it from service. Deputies arrested him a short distance from the scene and recovered the machete. Court records say he admitted to damaging the bus. King County prosecutors filed charges the following Tuesday and asked that he be held on $30,000 bail; his arraignment was set for Thursday, July 9.

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The charge itself is not entirely settled in public reporting. KOMO News, which first broke the story from charging documents, described the count as second-degree malicious mischief. Northwest Asian Weekly, reporting separately, described it as first-degree malicious mischief — a class B felony. The distinction matters under Washington law: RCW 9A.48.070 elevates malicious mischief to the first degree when the damage “causes an interruption or impairment of service rendered to the public” by damaging property of a public utility or “mode of public transportation” — language that appears to describe exactly what happened to a Metro bus pulled out of service by a cracked windshield. We are noting both outlets’ reporting rather than picking one, and will update this page once the formal charging document is confirmed.

Public reporting on Daniel Damien Lee Couch is thin. Neither KOMO News nor Northwest Asian Weekly has published his age, a booking photo, or a documented criminal history as of this writing. What is documented is narrower and more specific: the same Route 7 driver recalled an earlier encounter in which Couch allegedly damaged the bus’s front door, meaning this was reportedly not the pair’s first contact. Whether that earlier incident was itself charged, and whether Couch has any other pending cases, has not been reported. Consistent with the presumption of innocence, every fact above the arrest itself is an allegation prosecutors will have to prove; Couch has not been convicted of anything.

What is not in dispute is the location. Fourth and Jackson sits inside the same few blocks — anchored by the intersection of 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street, one block east — that King County officials, Seattle police, and CID business owners have called the neighborhood’s single worst hot spot for years. That history is the reason this incident reads less like an isolated outburst and more like the latest entry in a running tally.

The 12th and Jackson corridor’s recent history is a matter of public record, not conjecture. On November 8, 2024, five people were stabbed in a single attack at the intersection; King County charged Roland Jerome Lee, then 37, with four counts of first-degree assault and one count of fourth-degree assault. King County Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion (D) said at the time that “the residents, business workers, and visitors of the Chinatown-International District deserve to be safe and feel safe.” King County Metro responded by suspending four bus stops at the intersection — the same stops the Route 7 serves — citing “frequent illegal activity.” They stayed closed until March 3, 2025, when Metro reopened them alongside a pledge that roughly 80 percent of its transit police presence would be concentrated at that single corner.

“The residents, business workers, and visitors of the Chinatown-International District deserve to be safe and feel safe.”

Leesa Manion (D), King County Prosecuting Attorney, on charges filed after the November 2024 mass stabbing at 12th and Jackson

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The stops reopened, but the underlying problems reportedly did not go away. KOMO News documented a separate machete slashing in the area and quoted Henry Ku, owner of Henry’s Taiwan Restaurant, describing near-daily violence and gunfire and saying his restaurant sometimes seats a single table at lunch: “Nobody wants to come here.” Then-Seattle Councilmember Tanya Woo acknowledged the scale of the problem, saying “it took us many years to get to this point,” and proposed community de-escalation teams. On June 17, 2026 — about two weeks before the machete-and-bus incident — new Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson (D-Seattle) announced her own approach: increased police contacts, referrals to the county’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program instead of arrest for some offenses, and $1.1 million in one-time funding for outreach workers, mobile overdose treatment, and community programming.

The corridor’s troubles have already become a national story once this year, for a different reason. At a November 17, 2025 FIFA press conference announcing an expedited visa process for World Cup ticket holders, President Donald Trump (R) was asked about Seattle’s then-mayor-elect and openly mused about pulling matches from the city. “I watched her over the weekend… wow, that’s another beauty we got there,” Trump said of Wilson, calling her “very, very liberal-slash-communist” and warning that if there were “any trouble,” he would ask FIFA to move the games to “a different city.”

That tension resurfaced as the World Cup actually arrived in Seattle. Fox News and other outlets reported that Chinese and Vietnamese community members and CID business owners accused City Hall of treating the neighborhood as a “human dumping ground” even as tournament crowds filled Lumen Field a mile away. Woo, now a community advocate, said area businesses were seeing sales decline 10 to 20 percent. Wilson has defended her approach to policing and surveillance in the district, at one point saying of expanded camera programs, “Turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer, but it will certainly make our neighborhoods more vulnerable.” The machete-and-bus incident landed in the middle of that same debate — a concrete, charged case arriving while the argument over whether the city’s approach to the corridor is working was still very much unresolved.

Zoom out from this one bus and the pattern is a countywide one. King County Metro drivers have absorbed a string of violent incidents in recent years, culminating in the December 2024 fatal stabbing of Metro bus driver Shawn Yim, which prompted a county transit-safety task force and report. Metro says its “Care and Presence” approach cut operator assaults 56 percent from 2023 to 2024 and a further 20 percent from the first quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025, after assaults with charges pursued had peaked at 50 incidents in 2021. The King County Council approved $26.1 million in supplemental funding for more transit police and reinforced operator safety partitions, on track to reach every Metro bus by the end of 2026.

None of that context proves anything about Couch’s state of mind or intent on July 2 — that is what a courtroom will have to sort out. But it does mean this incident did not happen in a vacuum. It happened on the same route, at the same corner, less than two years after a mass stabbing forced Metro to abandon the stops entirely, and weeks after the city’s newest mayor staked her own credibility on fixing the same six square blocks.

A man King County prosecutors say was denied boarding for carrying a machete allegedly used it to smash a Route 7 Metro bus out of service in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District — the same corridor where a mass stabbing shut down these exact bus stops for nearly four months in 2024 and 2025, and where the city’s new mayor had just committed over a million dollars to a fresh public-safety plan. Daniel Damien Lee Couch faces a malicious mischief charge (reported as second-degree by one outlet and first-degree, a felony, by another), is held on $30,000 bail, and is presumed innocent while his case is pending. We will update this page with the confirmed charging degree, any criminal history that becomes public, and the outcome of his arraignment.

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