You parked your car illegally and you are in it cause you're dead? TICKET FOR YOU!

This story is making the news here. It seems the police ignored an illegally parked car for a month except to give it more and more parking tickets. Eventually they noticed the smell and found the owner’s body on the back seat, very badly decomposed.
He’d been dead about a month.

WTF were those oops thinking? They never thought to check the inside and see if anything was wrong?

Maybe the oops were thinking, ‘Cops!’ :smiley:

He should totally refuse to pay those.

I heard he made no comment on the issue.

Being dead is no excuse for parking violations. 'Round here this stuff is serious business.

Fails to surprise me. The block I was on in NYC seemed to be a dumping ground for stolen cars for a while (this was in the East Village). We’d have a car show up with a flat tire and a broken window, then sit there collecting tickets for months on end.

Then one day, there were three of these abandoned cars on the block taking up space and I had spent nearly a half hour trying to find a legal space for my car, and I totally lost my temper. I was watching a policewoman, bored out of her mind, stick yet another ticket on the huge pile of tickets on a car sitting in front of a hydrant, and I confronted her. I asked if she thought anyone in their right mind would leave a car to accumulate thousands of dollars in tickets and if she given a smidgen of a thought to checking out the car. She responded that when the tickets became more than four months overdue, a search would be run automatically. I asked her to indulge me and run the damn plates.

She comes back out of the police car, looking totally shocked. “This car WAS STOLEN!” Yes, I reply, and probably that one over there, and that one down the block that also has thirty tickets on it.

After that, the police started making regular scans of my block.

Yeah, he’s going to have a hard time fighting those tickets. I suppose he will get a pretty stiff fine.

Well, he’d better pay them. Otherwise he’ll be in tuh-rouble!

Yeah, they might throw him in the cooler.

I hear the accumulated fines could bury him.

“Sir, we’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, we found the car you reported stolen last month. The bad news is, we’ve impounded it for unpaid parking tickets.”

If it was me, I’d raise one hell of a stink about it.

He already did.

Are there legals issues perhaps preventing them from searching the vehicle without a warrant until the smell eventually becomes probably cause?

They can look inside a car and act on anything in plain sight, IIRC.

Pathetic.

It never ceases to amaze me the lengths some people are prepared to go to to get out of paying a parking ticket,anti social scum like him should be shot and THEN made to pay up,bastard!

Well, if he was in the back seat, presumably they just thought he was taking a nap. They just forgot the “dirt” part.

“What, you’re dead? So’s my grandma. Cry me a freakin’ river.” <rrrrip>

Under these circumstances, I guess booting the car would be kind of redundant.

It’s obvious the cops were trying to carry out the burial – only with him in the car instead of a casket and using tickets instead of dirt.