security cameras
Muni bus where a dead body was found after it had been parked in a storage yard for nearly six hours lacked functioning security cameras, although the system had been tested and worked a week earlier.
A cleaning crew discovered the body of Christopher Feasel, 37, of San Francisco around midnight Oct. 16 aboard a 5-Fulton that had been parked since 6:30 p.m. after completing a rush-hour shift, Muni spokesman Judson True said.
In response to a request from The Examiner, Muni acknowledged that the security cameras aboard the bus were not working during the time leading up to it being parked in the yard. The bus, however, did have functioning cameras just a week before the incident, True said.
Sometime between the testing and the incident the recorders stopped working, he said.
The cameras had been tested as part of a wide-ranging effort to review the technology on all Muni vehicles following previous high-
profile incidents that lacked recordings. Those incidents included the stabbing of a young boy last month and a collision between two streetcars at the West Portal station that injured 48 people July 18. Tests of the cameras are ongoing, True said.
“It’s disappointing,” he said. “We’re working hard to get cameras working.”
Footage from the security cameras may not have told the entire story of what led to Feasel’s death, but it could have provided “a lot of information that you wouldn’t have otherwise,” said David Sklansky, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.
A notable example was the widely circulated footage of the fatal shooting of an unarmed passenger by a then-BART police officer at an Oakland station New Year’s Day.