We all know to remove our license plates when selling our vehicles in Ohio. But, would you think to remove the plates if the vehicle were destroyed in an accident?
An area family failed to do that, and it has come back to haunt them.
Mike Earach says his daughter had a traffic accident in her 9-year-old vehicle back in April, and had it towed from the scene.
“My wife said the right rim was pushed in, and it looked like the axle was broken and the tire was bent in,” he said.
His daughter cancelled the liability insurance on the car after selling it to the towing company. Earach says, “They signed the title over to them for partial payment, then paid them money besides that for storage, and then got things out of the car.”
Earach says they thought everything was fine until last summer.
“Toward the end of August, we got two notices in the mail that we had past due for non-payment tickets. So, I called and they said, ‘You have to come down in person,’ ” he said.
Turns out, even though they say they were told the car was a total loss in that accident, somebody managed to fix it up and was driving it around.
“Once we went to court, we explained to the magistrate what had happened,” Earach says. “We took our paperwork with us and he threw the tickets out. When he pulled up the registration, he printed this up for me showing that the title was still in her name.”
Later, she received two more traffic tickets for that same car, a car she hadn’t seen in seven months. Incredibly, whoever is still driving the vehicle is doing so with expired license plates. In fact, that’s what all four tickets are about - expired plates. Because the driver never registered the vehicle in his name, he can’t get new plates so is driving illegally.
“I’d be happy just to get the car out of her name so she’s not liable. If we can just get that out of her name, I’ll be satisfied,” Earach says.
So I investigated and determined the towing company sold the car for junk to a salvage yard. It, in turn, sold the vehicle for parts to an individual. Unfortunately, there’s no paperwork to go with all those sales.
Most of the sales took place in Fairfax, so Fairfax Police Chief Rick Patterson told me he would write up an unauthorized license tag report. Using that, Earach was able to go to the bureau of motor vehicles and file to get her name off that vehicle.
Bottom line, whenever selling a vehicle, even one that’s been wrecked, you always need to take your license plates with you in Ohio, and make a copy of the front and back of the car title you’ve signed over. In Kentucky, the license plates stay with the vehicle.
