Related: Read about the life of Amin Taghikhani.
A motorcycle crash on the day of the Homecoming Parade killed a UF student.
About a month later, his family is demanding answers to questions left open about the lack of video recordings of the collision.
On Oct. 8, Amin Taghikhani, a UF biology senior, died after he was involved in a motorcycle crash on the intersection of Center Drive and Southwest Archer Road.
Taghikhani was sitting on the back of a motorcycle when Jayson Messieh, the motorcycle’s driver, struck a LFK Transportation Solutions, LLC van. Messieh, a UF microbiology and cell science junior, was on his way to the library with Taghikhani when the crash occurred.
The van was waiting in the middle of the intersection for a Gainesville Regional Transit System bus to move forward when it was struck, according to two eye-witnesses listed on a police report.
Gainesville Police spokesperson Capt. Jorge Campos said that officers shut down eastbound traffic on Archer Road for three hours, starting at 7:12 p.m.
One witness saw two bodies on the ground after the crash, according to the report. Neither Taghikhani nor Messieh were wearing helmets at the time of the accident.
Taghikhani was not listed on the initial crash report because nurses were rushing to administer emergency first aid, said Gary Juda, the attorney from Cohen & Juda Law Firm representing the Taghikhani family. Paramedics did not identify him at the scene because his documentation was in his backpack, Juda said.
Neither the RTS bus on the scene nor the traffic camera on the intersection of the crash site recorded video of the incident. The only footage that exists of the two victims was recorded by a passing bus, said Thomas Idoyaga, an RTS outreach and communications official.
“It shows the motorcycle passing the [passing] bus, but it did not show the accident,” he said.
The bus that was at the scene of the incident could have potentially recorded the accident, but the footage was recorded over, Idoyaga said. Each bus carries a small hard-drive which stores approximately 72 hours of video recorded from 3 cameras located around the bus. By the time GPD requested footage from the bus at the scene, it had already been recorded over.
More than 150 Gainesville city traffic cameras stream footage in real time but the videos are not saved, said Emmanuel Posadas, the Gainesville traffic operations manager. Access to the streams is given to the city and local partners like GPD and UF.
Campos said that the city cameras are monitored for special events, including UF games, on the basis of public safety. However, he said that the police department does not actively record the streams.
“My understanding now is that the cameras aren’t monitored and they don’t record,” Juda said. “The only time they are monitored is game day.”
The Taghikhani family is going to pursue litigation in the coming weeks, Juda said.
On Oct. 4, Amin Taghikhani and Jayson Messieh were involved in a motorcycle accident on the intersection of Archer Road and Center Drive. Both individuals were not wearing helmets at the time of the crash.
