An Oregon woman who dropped off her car to fixed got a weird surprise: a red light traffic ticket with a picture of The Mayor’s son and lady friend driving her car given just before 3am.
The unidentified woman left her 2001 Mitsubishi Montero with Steve’s Imports in Portland the day before Halloween after it didn’t pass an emissions test. She was told that it would take a week to fix the car and the whole thing ended up taking two trips to the auto shop at cost of $2,300.
But the Montero would not spend the entire time in the garage – and this is known, because an employee of Steve’s received a red light traffic camera ticket at close to 3am! But according to KVAL, the mechanic was wise to his screwup and tried a really dumb coverup:
“(The employee) did call my husband and said one of our technicians was driving it around and he thinks he ran a read light,” the mom said. “We said ‘no big deal’ because we thought it was during business hours.”
The day after she brought her car home, the Portland police traffic ticket arrived in the mail with several images from the red light camera at the intersection of Southwest 19th Avenue and East Burnside. That’s about 11 miles – and across the river – from Steve’s Imports on Southeast 92nd Avenue.
They show two people in the woman’s car; a man at the wheel and a woman in the passenger seat. The time marked on the ticket was 2:59 a.m. the morning after Halloween.
Naturally, this pissed off the car’s owner. So she contacted the local news, they investigated, and things to a surprising political turn
By late afternoon, the On Your Side Investigators finally reached Steve Spinnett by phone, who’s also the Mayor of Damascus. He said the man caught driving the car in the red light camera is his son, Tommy, who is also the shop foreman.
Spinnett said Tommy was driving the family’s car all weekend to run it through what he called “drive cycles.” Basically, that’s driving the car around town to make sure it’s running OK.
He said customers are not charged for drive cycles after hours.
“Three o’clock in the morning, it does look suspicious; We got a young person driving the car, there’s somebody else in the car, I can understand that,” Spinnett said, “but everything was above board. If it wasn’t above board, there’d be some disciplinary action.”
Rrrrrrright. You would never guess a guy spewing shit like that was a politician eh?
The auto shop now says that they will pay the ticket and the woman did pass her emissions tests.
