MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Student’s tickets in dispute
Her name is Karly Robinson and someone else is using it.
The 20-year-old St. Clair College student said she got a phone call this week from an acquaintance who said the car she was travelling in recently had been stopped by police. The young woman behind the wheel gave Robinson’s name and address and the officer wrote her up for being unable to produce a driver’s licence. Robinson said she visited Windsor police headquarters in a panic Monday where she learned there were four earlier tickets in her name. The driver had run a red light on June 28 and, unable to show proof of insurance, proper registration or a driver’s licence, got tickets then, too.
The officer’s advice: Hire a lawyer. “How can this happen?” Robinson said, incredulous that an officer can write a ticket using information from a driver unable to produce identification. Robinson, who has received speeding tickets while driving to Grand Bend where she found a summer job working as a waitress, said she has had her graduated licence suspended, in part, because of the tickets racked up by her impersonator.
Unable to drive, she is now unable to work. “This girl is ruining my licence, my life.” Meghan Goyea, the mother of Robinson’s boyfriend, accompanied Robinson to police headquarters Tuesday. Goyea, inspired by former local MP Shaughnessy Cohen who is her deceased aunt, said when she and Robinson weren’t permitted to speak to the officer who wrote the last ticket, they went to the mayor’s office where they were directed to the Windsor Police Services’s internal watchdog, the Professional Standards Branch.
Goyea said she is less interested in filing a complaint against the officers involved than she is in getting the young woman impersonating Robinson charged criminally. “What happens to this girl? She gets to do this and get away with it? I want her prosecuted,” Goyea said. Robinson said police were unable or unwilling to give her copies of the tickets. Instead, an officer wrote down the list of infractions on a small, yellow slip of paper about the size of her palm. Robinson said she has proof she wasn’t the driver in the incidents. She said she has phone records showing she was in Grand Bend on the dates the tickets were issued. She said, to lower her insurance rates, her mother had a tracking device installed on the car she drives. The GPS on it backs up her story that she was not in Windsor, she said.
She said the officer she spoke to at police headquarters Tuesday was not interested in seeing any ofit.
She said she fears if the officers involved insist they didn’t make a mistake, she will be on the hook for the tickets.
“It’s a police officer’s word against a 20-year-old girl.” Goyea said she is prepared to help Robinson fight the tickets in court, but doesn’t believe it should have to come to that.
“She shouldn’t have to get a lawyer,” Goyea said.
“I understand police have a frustrating job and they deal with frustrating people all day, but their job is to protect and serve and she is not being protected or served,” Goyea said of Robinson’s predicament.
Windsor police spokesman Const. Andrew Drouillard said it’s difficult to comment on a situation that is before the courts. “This is something we would investigate,” Drouillard said of the impersonation allegations. “I encourage her to come forward to us again.”
Robinson said she and her mother have visited local payday loan companies and are checking into whether there are credit cards or other debts in her name.
“If they got away with traffic tickets, they could be doing other things. Who knows what they are getting away with?”
I understand police ... deal with frustrating people all day, but their job is to protect and serve and she is not being protected or served.