Yesterday, San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and Fire Department (SFFD) released a joint statement announcing that the pedestrian who died in the South of Market neighborhood on August 14th had been struck and killed by a Muni bus. The statement, which described the man’s death as “an all-around heart breaking [sic] and tragic incident,” clarified that — contrary to initial reporting — the incident had nothing to do with the Cruise autonomous vehicles that happened to be present at the time of the accident. “Press reports, relying on an internal report from an SFFD staff member on the scene, have suggested that the San Francisco Fire Chief attributed the death of the pedestrian to Cruise AV interference with first responder operations. This is inaccurate: The San Francisco Fire Chief has not attributed this pedestrian death to Cruise AVs,” Stephen Chun, SFMTA’s spokesman, wrote. In other words, it wasn’t the Fire Chief who lied about the incident — it was someone else at the SFFD.

The statement marked the end of a protracted battle between, on one side, journalists and anti-AV activists who insisted that Cruise vehicles had blocked the egress of first responders rushing the man to the hospital and, on the other side, Cruise, which insisted (with video evidence) that their cars had immediately and appropriately yielded to ambulances. Though the city has now definitively rejected claims of Cruise’s involvement in the pedestrian’s death, the weeks-long, anti-AV press cycle fueled by the incident led, among other things, to a partial pause on the roll-out of AV in San Francisco; a barrage of anti-AV vandalism; and a wave of social media hysteria denouncing out-of-control ‘robotaxis.’ Here’s how it all happened.

On August 14, at around 11 pm, a homeless man was crossing a street in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood when he was hit by a bus. When first responders arrived on the scene and found the man unresponsive and bleeding heavily, they quickly transported him to the hospital. He was pronounced dead shortly after arrival.