Queens, NY – A man was slapped with a parking ticket as he lay dead in the driver’s seat of his car, cops and family said Wednesday.
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Nicholas Rappold, 21, of Flushing, was slumped across the front seat of his Jeep Cherokee on 165th St. near 35thAve. Tuesday morning when a traffic agent wrote him up for being illegally parked during street sweeping, cops and family said.
“It’s really messed up,” the young man’s cousin Patrick Hill told the Daily News. “While he was dead in his car, a New York City traffic agent gave him a ticket.”
An hour after the ticket was issued, a friend whose house Rappold had left in the middle of the night spotted his buddy’s vehicle still parked outside, sources said.
The curious pal went to see why the SUV was still there and found Rappold’s cold body, sources said.
Investigators interviewed the traffic agent but found no wrongdoing. “He had heavily tinted windows,” a police source said in defense of the postmortem ticket. “It was hard to see inside.”
But family argued that the officer could have seen Rappold, who had recently been in rehab for pill abuse.
“She could have at least knocked on the window to see if he was all right,” Hill said.
The cause of death is still to be determined by the medical examiner, but investigators believe Rappold died hours before the ticketing from an overdose.
Police voided the parking summons after they released the vehicle to the family.
In these types of situations, any fines would be paid out of the estate of the niftar. Unfortunately, simply dying does not relieve the deceased of his/her debts. In this case, the ticket writer should also have checked on the condition of the individual in the car but there is no debate that the vehicle was illegally parked.
The ticket writer has NO responsibility to look inside a car; and did NOTHING wrong.
This cop is obviously a liberal. It isn’t enough to tax someone when alive, they still go after you after they tax you to death.LOL cah cah cah
#1 you Sir are an idiot.
#5 , There is no shortage of them idiots here. All you need to do is read the comments.
Why is different when the traffic agent sees me parked at a hydrant and writes me a ticket while i am still alive. They dont check drivers if the are alive or dead..If you are parked illeaglly u get slapped with a ticket…Remember few moths ago they towed a funeral car with a body in the back…
he might have been dead, but he was still parked illegally
This incident is newsworthy for its entertainment value. However, it also portrays the greediness of the mayor and his policies as far as motorists and car owners go.
I need some help with understanding something here. An automobile is not guilty or charged with a crime. The owner (or other responsible party) is. The citation is for that responsibility. How that responsibility extends to the dead is beyond me. I am not asking for a legal response. I would not understand the legalese anyways. Just a philosophical question. Can dead people commit crimes? Can dead people be held responsible to move their cars? Perhaps posthumous verdicts and summonses are as sensible as awards. There’s some humor here somewhere.
#7 ….distingsions in the law are not always easy.
when you are at the drivers seat at a hydrant, you are standing…this is a misdameanor.
however, alternate side deals with parking, clearly the decedant if tickable should be exempt because he was behind the wheel….which is clearly not parking.
NYC has its priorities.
#1 , you *did* read the last line of the article, right?
why should they check?????? because if you read a ticket it says quite clearly that if operator of vehicle is present the officer must ask for ID!!!!!!!!!!!! i just got off a ticket because the agent who gave me the ticket for no good reason but we will not discuss that did not ask me for ID and the judge threw it out instantly!! no questions asked!!!
#1 it is no parking not standing if yoyu are in a car they usually ask you to move and as for standing by a hydrant as long ass you are in the car you should not have been ticketed in my day you were asked to move. but if you were parked that was different
If the guy intends to do pills risking an overdose, he should have foresight not to park in the spot where the parking is time-limited. And his family, if they had any decency at all, would consider themselves fortunate and be grateful that he died before he drove off and exposed others to the danger.
It is amazing to see all these stupid comments.
The guy died and was illegally parked and got booked without being seen.
That’s all. I am sure they would have let him off the ticket if they wrote a letter. There is nothing to talk about.
You are writing your silly chochmas very flippantly about a tragedy, he was somebody.
The cop did nothing wrong. Many people sleep in the car. It is not her job to check on people unless you see violence.
cop should have knocked on the window to tell him to move the car