A collision between a cab and a motorcycle at the intersection of Commonwealth Avenue and Linden Street yesterday afternoon sent the bike’s passenger flying over the car, according to the motorcycle’s driver.
Both passengers of the motorcycle were taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and were discharged soon after the 3:45 p.m. collision with “severe bruising.”
“I was pretty [banged] up,” said the driver of the bike,Mark Stern, a New England School of Photography second-year graduate student.
Stern said he was driving his 1989 Yamaha Fzr 600 down the access road to Commonwealth Avenue at about 25 miles per hour when he came to the intersection and saw the cab trying to cross onto Linden Street.
Stern, of Brookline, said the cab was at a standstill in the intersection when “he decided to drive, but after he decided to drive he decided to stop . . . because he saw us and was like, ‘oh my God.'”
Stern said he and passenger Meaghan Tighe, a University of Massachusetts sophomore, hit the backlight tire area of the cab after braking to about 10 mph.
“We think it could’ve been faster, [but] I braked quickly,” he said. “Apparently we flipped over [the cab], according to other people.”
“And the best part of the story is [the cab driver] starts yelling at us while we’re on the ground,” Stern said. “He gets out and starts asking us . . . ‘Why did you speed up?'”
School of Management senior Chris Kim said he heard a loud noise when the incident happened, but could not be sure if he saw a body flying through the air.
“All I know is when I got to that corner, it was a girl maybe 10 to 15 feet from the cab and 10 to 15 feet from the [T] tracks,” Kim said. Stern said he landed about 10 feet from the cab.
Kim said Stern and Tighe were on the ground next to the cab, and Tighe “was definitely on the other side of the cab.”
Kim said many people called 9-1-1, and at least five people were at the scene immediately following the collision.
Stern said he went to see if Tighe was okay when police arrived on the scene and a crowd formed.
“We had our helmets [on], which are nice and scratched up,” he said. Stern also said the visors on both helmets broke off in the collision.
Stern said he was driving Tighe, a former co-worker of his from Bertucci’s in Kenmore, to “take care of things during her break” and then to watch the New England Patriots game when the accident occurred.
Stern said he was not sure if his bike would be operational after the incident.
“I’d say that it’s a 50 percent [chance] here,” he said.
Ryan Meehan contributed reporting for this article.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
