On the evening of August 5th, Long Island resident Lara Tepper was riding the train from Hicksville to Manhattan to meet friends for dinner. But her plans were seriously derailed after an LIRR conductor accused her of using a counterfeit ticket. Tepper says she purchased the 10-trip ticket for $66 in July, and had already used it four times, but when the conductor came to punch her ticket, "She looked at it, felt it for a couple of minutes, and said it's fake." That's because the ticket was missing the MTA logo hologram "Watch the gap" warning.
Tepper says that when she arrived at Penn Station, "like 15 cops" were waiting, and they escorted her to a 6-foot-by-6-foot holding cell at the MTA police's offices in the station. She tells Newsday, "At this point, I was hysterical, because I realized what was going on." Police told her she could be fingerprinted, spend the night in the cell and face a judge in the morning. But eventually, a lieutenant took her ticket to a veteran LIRR conductor, who scratched the back of the ticket to reveal a hidden MTA logo. Cops then checked with the LIRR Hicksville office, where it was confirmed that the ticket was printed on a stock that had been out of circulation for years. Oopsy!
More than three hours after she boarded the train, Tepper was released with an apology and a brand new 10-trip ticket! But her attorney says that's not good enough; he just filed a suit seeking $500,000 in damages, and says the whole affair was "quite a lot of overkill."
