‘TTC Leprechaun’ is back, and he's still obnoxious

Last fall, a man in a green shirt wearing a bowler hat took up two seats on a the 72 Pape bus in Toronto. When a rider asked him to move his bag so she could sit down, he refused, insulted her, stomped on her foot and pushed her.

The infamous rider was quickly dubbed the “TTC Leprechaun” and shamed online for his rude behaviour.

A mock Twitter account for @TTCLeprechaun was created.

The man was never identified in the media, nor were charges pressed.

Now Toronto’s transit villain appears to have angered more riders.

During rush hour on Friday, a man mounted his bicycle on the front rack of an already-full 25 Pape bus. When the driver told him the bus was too full and that he’d have to remove his bike, the man refused — even though the next bus was right behind that one — and stubbornly sat on the bike rack so the bus couldn’t leave the station.

Eye witnesses recognized the man as the “TTC Leprechaun.”

“Up close, it’s the same person; he still has the beard, still has earrings and glasses, he looked exactly the same,” Beth Lyn Ward, a Toronto communications consultant who witnessed the incident and stuck around after other passengers left, told the National Post.

“He was saying things like ‘You can let me on or you can run me over,’” she told Metro News.

Ward posted a photo of the offender on Facebook, where it has been shared more than 460 times.

Passengers got off the train while the driver waited for police to arrive. Ward stayed back to be a witness for the driver.

“I may have my own problems with the TTC from time to time, but I knew no one else was going to stick around,” she said. “And the bus drivers need people to stand up for them sometimes.”

Eventually, police arrived, arrested the man, and changed him under the Ontario Trespass to Property Act.

Ward told police about the previous TTC incident.

“He was really proud of it,” Ward said of his online fame.

“He said on the bus that he had sued the police before and that he had won and that’s what he was living off of now — his motives seemed very clear to me,” Ward said of the angry passenger.

Ward posted the story on Reddit, as did another Torontonian.

Others started sharing similar stories of uncomfortable encounters with the miserable citizen.

“It is him, 100%,” wrote Redditor BlackJackBob. “I’ve said it in the past and I’ll say it again. I’ve had the ultimate misfortune of dealing with this s*** head in a retail environment. You think he’s bad on the TTC? Imagine how bad he is when he wants something from you.”

Another Redditor identified the man as a “courier of some sort.”

Ward told Metro News that she hopes angry passengers don’t “take things into their own hands,” and instead trust police to deal with the infamous rider in future incidents.

“The best way to handle this is to keep an eye on him because he’ll eventually break the law and that’s when people should call the cops and let them deal with it,” she said.