What the heck does 12d and 43b mean?
Has it been verified there were construction signs on the bridge that night? Did the medical examiner release this information via the press conference he promised, or was it found out through phone calls?
Probably 12' and 43". I would guess that these were originally single-quotes and double-quotes in an extended character set, as abbreviations for feet and inches. These symbols aren't portable, so they were changed to words during editing, but somebody forgot to delete the symbols, and they got changed at some point (lost their high bit in a file transfer or some such thing).