Page 12 - IAV Digital Magazine #609

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
She Turned in Her ‘Star
Trek’ License Plates, but
the Tickets Kept Coming
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sNDM7mx-XQY
On Amazon, a New York-like plate stamped with “NCC 1701” sells for $14. Such plates are unof- ficial, meant for dis- play only, for bicycles or to be fastened to toys, but when affixed on vehicles they can generate captures from road-safety cam- eras and trigger the type of violations that ended up plaguing Ms. Koorey.
Ms. Koorey has amassed a stack of tickets that assume she has been flouting the law in a cross- country spree cap- tured on camera and on random vehicles with U.S.S. Enterprise plates in more than 20 states, including Washington, Ohio, Texas, Florida and, well, New York.
In New York City alone, the Department of Finance said in November that she owed $16,585.22 for violations and penal- ties, a document from the department shows. There were tickets for speeding in a school zone, driving in a bus lane and
other toll infractions — even, supposedly, for her involvement in robberies in Ohio and in Canada. All were misunderstandings that she had to clear up over the phone, Ms. Koorey said in an interview.
She said she had contacted the D.M.V., government represen- tatives and law enforcement officials in the jurisdictions issuing the tickets or violations to have them dismiss the fines and get her name completely removed from online records. “I have been dealing with these people every day on the phone, trying to tell these people, ‘It’s not me,’” she said.
It is illegal in New York to drive with plates purchased from an unofficial online retailer. Names of previous drivers are not unlinked from records of old or expired plates, although they are marked as surren- dered and destroyed when turned in.
Beda
Koorey, a retired legal secretary, returned her license plates stamped with “NCC 1701,” like the identi- fying tag of the U.S.S. Enterprise in the “Star Trek” series, to the Department of Motor Vehicles in New York in April 2020.
But in August of that year, a $50 ticket for speeding in the Bronx arrived in the mailbox at her Long Island home in Huntington, N.Y., even though she had stopped driving in June as her eyesight weakened.
Then another ticket arrived, and another.
Apparently, “Star Trek” fans were still out there, some doing their imitation of warp-drive speed on the roads, or just driv- ing badly, and using replicas of the plates with the starship tag.
“There is even one of ‘me’ driving a motor- cycle,” she said.
When she returned the personalized plates that she no longer wanted to pay for, and which had
been
purchased in 1998 by her former husband, a Trekkie, she was given a receipt that said “plates destroyed.” But for the next four years, Ms. Koorey, 75, was entangled in state bureaucracy and caught in the zeal of “Star Trek” fans who had ordered similar Enterprise-themed novelty tags from online retailers that were erroneously traced back to her. She said she received hundreds of violations without driving a car.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine