MINNEAPOLIS — Surveillance video shows a man on a motorcycle being tossed through the air earlier this month during a high-speed hit-and-run.

Carl Vargas was riding through downtown Minneapolis when a car blew through a red light, T-boning his motorcycle.

Miraculously, Vargas is alive and is expected to recover.

“By the grace of God, he survived due to the helmet,” said Andy Meissner, Vargas’s brother.

Vargas’s family has spent hours canvassing the area to obtain video of the crash. It also shows what happened next.

Two people get out of the crashed car and immediately get into a second vehicle that had been trailing directly behind them.

“It’s believed that the car was stolen and that another car was tailing them,” said Victoria Nichols, Vargas’s aunt.

They drove off, abandoning the first car, and now his family says Vargas is in the hospital with skull fractures, broken bones and brain bleeding.

“Every day I go in and visit, I’m just reminding him how the physical recovery is only part of the battle and that the mental side is the rest of it, and that’s where he excels the most,” Meissner said.

Vargas wasn’t just the victim of a hit-and-run. While he was lying on the sidewalk, severely injured, someone on the street walked up and stole his bag.

Nichols says Vargas had everything in the bag, including his ID, credit cards and phone.

Vargas’s family hopes someone who witnessed the crash can help, particularly one person seen in the surveillance video who looks to be recording everything, including the getaway car’s license plate.

“We’re just motivated to…figure out who did this to him to hold someone accountable,” Nichols said.

Minneapolis police say they’re investigating, but no one’s been arrested.

“Hopefully we can get some exposure on this in a way that leads to justice for Carl,” Meissner said.

The long-discussed prospect of a pedestrian and biking bridge connecting north and northeast Minneapolis over the Mississippi River is finally in the works, and it has residents buzzing.

Up to 100 people from across the city turned out Tuesday for the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board’s latest open house for the project. Nine attendees interviewed by the Star Tribune expressed excitement for a bridge that would expand access to the riverfront and connect two neighborhoods separated by more than 500 feet of water for those on foot and bikes or other small wheels.

“It’s something we’ve been dreaming about it,” said Mariam Slayhi, the president of the Bottineau Neighborhood Association in northeast. “We’ve been left separated, both sides of the river.”

The idea of a non-vehicular bridge connecting the two neighborhoods has been floated for around 25 years. Last fall, the park board began preliminary design work for a crossing that would connect N. 26th Avenue, on the west side of the river, to an area just south of NE. 18th Avenue, on the east side.

The east side landing would also include new trail paths leading down to the water, a dock and an outpost building for watercraft storage and classroom space for community use.

The plan — currently estimated to cost up to $35 million for just the bridge — still faces at least a five-year road before any grand opening, according to Tyler Pederson, the project manager. Concept designs are expected to be submitted to the park board by late summer.

But many residents felt confident Tuesday that the bridge would come.

The event marked the park board’s second open house for the project. Two bridge designs were presented: one for a wooden truss bridge with an overhead cover and the other for an arched steel bridge.

The potential for a crossing is exciting to many because it would connect the city’s two segments of the Great Northern Greenway, which stretches west to Theodore Wirth Park and east to Sunset Cemetery. A connection would streamline non-vehicular access to schools, businesses and the river itself on both sides.

North Minneapolis has largely been shut off from the river by industrialization and the construction of Interstate 94, which destroyed hundreds of homes in the 1960s.

“We don’t have a lot of access,” said Meg Luce, a North side resident.

Ted Tucker, an advocate for river access, said the east side landing of the bridge would be a destination for North Minneapolis.

“(It) would be a marvelous facility to get people down to the river,” he said.

The bridge would sit between the Lowry Avenue Bridge and the Burlington Northern Sante Fe Railway Bridge. Pederson said about 100 people already cross the latter bridge every day, despite it being designed only for trains.

Multiple people at the open house admitted they’ve used the railway crossing on foot.

“I’m all in favor of an elegant solution,” said Richard Rubenstein. “I think there’s a need.”

MINNEAPOLIS — The Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association filed an ethics complaint Tuesday against Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.

• Moriarty made numerous extrajudicial statements for publication with the intent to prejudice a jury.
• Moriarty repeatedly made false statements regarding key issues in the case in the press and court documents
• Moriarty undermined the administration of justice through her repeated lies, disregard of key facts, and other conduct she has admitted to being politically motivated

“Moriarty’s obviously unethical conduct can be explained only by a desire to prosecute a peace officer—regardless of the facts—to achieve political ends,” the association’s executive director, Brian Peters, said in a statement.

“Moriarty admitted that even the decision to finally dismiss this case was based on her preferred policy goals, and not in the interests of justice.”

In a statement to the Star Tribune, Moriarty’s office wrote that: “This is an unsurprising action by the MPPOA, an organization that has consistently lobbied against attempts to hold law enforcement accountable and opposed regulations that would ban law enforcement from being involved in white supremacist groups.”

Read the entire complaint here.