CANAL WINCHESTER, Ohio -- Nobody likes getting a speeding ticket. But what if you opened your mail and found a ticket in your name that you know you're not responsible for?
Eleanor Mandeville got a surprise when she opened her mail one day.
"Those are all tickets," she said. "It's addressed to Eleanor Mandeville and shows a picture of the car and then this whole list of tickets."
Mandeville, 76, of Canal Winchester had somehow accumulated a long list of speeding tickets in Cleveland.
"I don't think I have ever been in Cleveland," she said.
The tickets and the car in the photos weren't hers.
Mandeville went to Fairfield County Sheriff's Deputy Jim Nicolia to figure out what was going on and he took a good look at the photo included with the tickets.
"I studied the picture and thought that zero (on the license plate) just doesn't look quite right to me and then I thought, maybe it's an O, and typed it into the system and found a BMW out of Cleveland. I thought we've got our problem solved," Nicolia said.
Mandeville once had standard issue license plate BMW 750. A man in Cleveland now has the vanity license plate BMW 75O.
But Mandeville hasn't had the license plates in 17 years.
"I checked her through the system and, lo and behold, the license tags expired back in 1992. So right there told me something's not right," Nicolia said.
He called to Cleveland, had the tickets cleared up and removed from Mandeville's record -- until February.
"I was really shocked because I thought it was all over," she said.
Mandeville received another speeding ticket and a notice that she was late paying a fine that, again, wasn't hers.
The ticket was for $165 and last week, she received another ticket for $100 for traveling 48 mph in a 35 mph zone.
Since 2003, Mandeville has received 12 speeding tickets. So NBC 4 called the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and filed an official request for Mandeville's record, asking about the problem.
"Anytime you are keying in plate combinations, there is always room for error and that's why we have an appeals process," said Lindsey Bohrer, of the Ohio Department of Public Safety. "Since it's beyond our record retention, we did go ahead and purge the system and she is no longer affiliated with that plate. So she should stop getting those ticket notices."
NBC 4 spoke to the BMV office Monday morning and officials reassured Mandeville and NBC 4 that she is no longer associated with the old license plate, so the error shouldn't happen again.
For additional information, stay with nbc4i.com and NBC 4 and refresh nbc4i.com -- Where Accuracy Matters.
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