This Week’s Wacky Wednesday: Police Officer Tickets a Vehicle with a Dead Man Inside
Finding a place to park can be a nightmare, and let’s be honest; no one likes parallel parking. Many people will drive in circles for half an hour to find a spot before they parallel park. When you find a great spot, though, especially if you are in a large urban setting like New York City, you don’t want to give it up. Sometimes, though, you can only park in an area for a certain length of time or on certain days, for example. Therefore, you will want to make sure that you are never illegally parked. If you are, it means you will end up getting a ticket and you could even have your vehicle towed and impounded.
Ticketing the Dead
As the title says, a police officer in Queens, NY issued a traffic ticket to a driver who was illegally parked during the hours that the streets were supposed to be swept. The police officer came up to the vehicle and placed the ticket on the windshield of the Jeep Cherokee. The officer then left without bothering to actually look inside the vehicle according to the family and friends of the deceased that was found inside a short time later.
It was about an hour after the ticket was placed on the vehicle that a friend of the vehicle’s owner noticed that the Jeep, which belonged to Nicholas Rappold, was still parked in the same spot. Rappold had left his friend’s apartment a few hours earlier, and the friend found it odd that the vehicle was still there. It was the friend who looked into the vehicle and found the body sitting behind the wheel… apparently, something the trained observer in the police department failed to see, or saw and did not care to check on.
Naturally, the family and friend were distraught that the officer did not bother to check on the person in the vehicle if they even bothered to notice them. The police did say that the vehicle had windows that were heavily tinted, so it is possible that she could not have seen inside even if she had tried. She might have assumed that if someone were in the vehicle, they would have seen her approach.
It turned out that Rappold had died of a drug overdose shortly after he left his friend’s place and got into his vehicle. He had been to rehab for issues with pills shortly before his death. Wondering what happened with the citation he was issued? In this case, the policed voided the ticket.
You would think that is what would generally happen when someone who dies has tickets that they are supposed to pay. That’s not the way it typically works, though. Most of the time, that person’s estate is still responsible for taking care of the tickets. In many cases, this still means that the person’s tickets end up unpaid. If they did not have money enough to pay them while they were alive, it is unlikely that they had a large enough of an estate to take care of tickets after their death.
A Sad Tale
It is always sad when someone loses their life, especially when it is due to something like pill addiction and overdosing. There is a serious problem with addiction all across the world, particularly in North America. It causes deaths, causes people to do things that they normally would not due, and a host of other problems.