A Taipei bus driver has been given a one-year deferred sentence for an accident that killed a visiting US professor in July last year, the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday.
Prosecutors said that based on a police report, bus driver Ho Chi-nan (侯智南) had right of way when a traffic light turned green, but failed to yield to a pedestrian, Bruce Bridgeman, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was in Taipei to give a speech.
Both parties settled out of court (the amount was not disclosed due to a confidential agreement), but prosecutors fined Ho NT$20,000.
Bridgeman, known for his neuroscience research, and his wife were in Taiwan at the invitation of Taipei Medical University as part of a speaking tour of Asia.
On July 10, Bridgeman was crossing a multilane intersection near the Howard Plaza Hotel on Renai Road when he was hit by a bus driven by Ho.
Bridgeman was taken to Taipei City Hospital, Renai Branch, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Renai Road is a one-way road, although there are bus lanes going in both directions, police said.
The accident occurred because Bridgeman was not familiar with the road system, and the bus driver was negligent, police said.
Bridgeman’s wife has not filed charges.
Bridgeman joined the University of Santa Cruz facility in 1973 and remained with the university throughout this career, the university said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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