Man slammed with parking tickets for car he never owned

MILWAUKEE (WITI) -- Since 2009, a man has been getting parking tickets and toll road violations for a car he doesn't own.

"It's really been exhausting," says Lee E. Williams.

Over the years, Lee says he and his wife have received dozens of parking tickets in the mail, along with notices of unpaid Illinois tolls. The debts kept piling up because he couldn't convince the ticketing agencies they were going after the wrong person.

"I didn't pay them because we weren't the party," he says. "And I thought we would be able to resolve this and it would be all over with."

But it never got resolved, and the tickets kept coming.

"They threatened to suspend our license, to tow away our vehicles," he says. "I mean it’s like a nightmare."

That nightmare cost them. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue intercepted their state tax refunds two years in a row. Lee and his wife were out hundreds of dollars for a car they never owned.

The FOX6 Investigators began looking into the matter a couple of weeks ago, and now the Department of Transportation is finally admitting a mistake was made.

"I don’t disagree with him at all," says Mitchell Warren of the DOT. "We made a mistake, and it’s important to do everything we can to try to rectify that."

It turns out, the mistake was made by a local car dealership. You see, when you buy a car, the dealership is in charge of filling out the paperwork for the title. In this case, the DOT says the car dealership put the wrong name on the title – the wrong "Lee E. Williams."

We tried to find the "right" Lee E. Williams, but instead we found her daughter.

"Lee Ethel Williams is my mother, and she lives in Chicago, Illinois," says Pamela Rideout, a Milwaukee resident who was the primary owner of the car.

She says she bought the car in 2009, and her mother, Lee Ethel Williams, co-signed for it. She also told us she had no idea someone else was getting billed for her tickets, and to her knowledge, she had already paid the tickets she knew about.

In fact, she says, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue intercepted her state taxes and her mother’s.

"I know I didn’t have all these tickets," she says.

So did Milwaukee Parking get its money three times? They say that’s impossible, but they declined an interview for our story. They say the city’s collections agency will try to collect an unpaid debt from multiple owners of the same car, but that won’t result in double payment. They didn’t explain how that’s possible.

But they did, finally, cut Mr. Williams a check for some of the money taken from his tax returns, and the city says it may owe him even more.

Mr. Williams is still upset about the way he was treated when he tried to resolve the error on his own.

"They were really nasty," he says.

He says the Illinois Tollway forgave the debt years ago, but the city of Milwaukee wouldn't budge – even back in 2009 when he showed them a letter from the DOT which proved he didn't own the car.

"Milwaukee was the only one that we weren't able to get any results from," he says.

The city still isn’t accepting responsibility for the error, explaining to FOX6 in emails that the original owner of the car, the dealership, and the Department of Motor Vehicles are more to blame for the mix up.