Appeared on the first trial day as a StarMetro City of Tallahassee bus system employee, called by the State to authenticate surveillance footage from two city buses on July 18, 2014, the day Dan Markel was killed. On direct examination by Georgia Cappleman, the account covered the technical setup of the onboard system: eight cameras per bus, continuous recording from engine start, and storage on an onboard hard drive for roughly thirty days. The buses identified as 505 and 707 were confirmed to have had cameras in proper working order that day, and a disk containing footage from those buses was authenticated and marked. The State reserved publication of the exhibit. Saam Zangeneh asked for a short break before publication, which Judge Hankinson denied, and Zangeneh indicated he would cross-examine.
Cross-examination pursued two lines. The first narrowed what the footage actually showed: on review with a state investigator, only a passenger in a white shirt was briefly visible, for approximately five to ten seconds, with no view of the driver, the back seat, facial features, tattoos, or anything held. Zangeneh ran a live five-second count for the jury to mark the length of that window. The second line went to the exhibit itself. Asked whether the video was the original footage, the answer was that it was not: the prosecution had combined two separate clips into one and added vehicle highlights that StarMetro's own system cannot generate, edits StarMetro did not make. The exhibit bearing the witness's initials — the video the jury would see — was confirmed to be, in the phrasing used on the record, the altered video. Magbanua's counsel waived cross, and Cappleman declined redirect.
The State recalled the witness later in the same session, still under oath, to cure that gap. A thumb drive reviewed during the intervening break was confirmed to hold the full original footage from both buses, without truncated clips and without annotation circles, and it was offered to supplement the composite version. On a brief voir dire, Zangeneh probed the new exhibit's chain of custody, and the answer conceded that the clips on the thumb drive had been downloaded from the government's computer rather than transferred directly from the original StarMetro disc produced under subpoena. Pressed on whether the content was nonetheless the same 2014 footage, the witness said he had viewed it and was certain it matched. Zangeneh stated he was satisfied and raised no objection, and Judge Hankinson admitted the exhibit before recessing for the evening.
Across the four appearances the testimony functioned as records-custodian authentication rather than eyewitness account, and its trial significance lay in what it fixed about the video evidence: that the bus cameras captured only a brief, featureless view of a white-shirted passenger, and that the version first authenticated for the jury had been edited by the prosecution. The admissions on cross prompted the State's recall and the introduction of an unedited copy, with the custody route of that copy itself surfaced on the record before admission.
