Mother of slain CATS bus driver Ethan Rivera finds some relief in suspect’s arrest
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Shooting of a Charlotte bus driver
Ethan Rivera, a 41-year-old bus driver for Charlotte Area Transit System, died Feb. 12, 2022, a day after being shot aboard his CATS bus. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police say a road rage incident led to the shooting.
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Sylvia Rivera said she received a call at 7:38 Tuesday morning: The man suspected of killing her son had been arrested.
Rivera said she got “so excited” when she saw the number.
“When he told me that they caught him, I just couldn’t stop trembling,” Rivera told the Observer by phone from New York.
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Her son, Ethan Rivera, had worked as a bus driver for the Charlotte Area Transit System for just over a year when he was shot on Feb. 11, in what Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police call a road-rage incident. He died a day later.
After a two-week manhunt, Darian Dru Thavychith, 21, was apprehended in Shawnee, Kansas, CMPD Capt. Joel McNelly said during a news conference Tuesday. Thavychith will be extradited and charged with murder and shooting into an occupied vehicle, McNelly said.
“Right now, I feel relieved that he’s off the streets and he can’t hurt nobody else,” Sylvia Rivera said.
She said she still doesn’t understand why a “verbal altercation” led to her son’s death.
“What was so harshly said to you that you had to pull a gun?” Rivera said.
Rivera ‘a good soul,’ mom says
Ethan Rivera moved from New York to North Carolina to be closer to his daughter and son so they could “have a father in their life,” his mother said.
“And now they don’t,” Sylvia Rivera said.
Ethan Rivera enjoyed being out driving a bus, which his mother described as his “dream job.”
“He was very happy doing what he was doing,” she said.
Since Rivera’s shooting, many CATS workers have called on increased security, including at Monday’s City Council meeting.
“I’m behind the bus drivers,” Sylvia Rivera said. “And any person that drives a train or bus for the city, they should all be protected, because this could happen to any one of them.”
She said her son could be stubborn sometimes, and he was funny. Everyone in North Carolina, she said, told her Ethan “always had a smile on his face” and that “he had a good heart.”
“He was a good soul, you know? Beautiful eyes, great smile, and he was a good person,” Sylvia Rivera said.
This story was originally published March 2, 2022 at 11:22 AM.
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