Suspect in Vancouver bus attack has died of an overdose, police say

Transit police say the suspect in an attack on a Vancouver bus last month died of an overdose not long after the incident.

On Tuesday, police asked the public for help identifying a man who assaulted a fellow bus passenger on April 15 after she tried to intervene in his racist harassment of two East Asian women wearing facemasks.

Since then, according to a release, investigators have been able to identify the suspect as a 48-year-old Vancouver man who was well known to police and had no fixed address.

The man died of a suspected overdose one week after the attack, police said.

According to police, the assault happened after two women wearing masks boarded the bus at Main and Hastings.

The suspect told them to "go back to your country; that's where it all started."

A woman sitting directly across from the suspect told him to leave the other two women alone.

Police say the suspect allegedly jumped up and kicked the woman in the leg, pulled her hair so hard that a large clump was pulled from her head, punched her in the head multiple times and wrestled her to the ground.

The incident is just one of several recent incidents linked to racism against people of East Asian descent in B.C.