Case Exposes Disabled Parking Abuse

WILMETTE, Ill. (STNG) - A recent North Shore case indicates able-bodied people could park in handicapped spaces all over Illinois with little chance of getting caught.

Vogt Ted Barys, 21, of Wilmette faces misdemeanor and felony charges of acquiring a state handicapped parking placard by making up almost everything on the application except his name.

No one in the Illinois secretary of state office ever checks application information, an official said.

“I don’t think the resources are there to monitor it up front,” said Dave Druker, secretary of state spokesman.

The secretary of state’s police, working with local authorities, have written hundreds of tickets in stings in recent years. But those charges mostly involve people using relatives’ placards, expired placards and drivers without placards.

As far as the secretary of state’s disability liaison Bill Bogdan knows, none involved someone who faked an application.

Larry Albers, who heads a California-based nonprofit that publishes police guides to enforcement of handicapped-parking space laws, said 15 percent of placards nationwide might be bogus.

Wilmette Police Officer Landon Girard probed Barys’ alleged placard abuse. “An anonymous informant told me in June” 2007 that Barys had a placard he didn’t deserve, plus a fake prescription for his car’s tinted front windows, Girard said.

Girard remembered the tip when he pulled over Barys for speeding Nov. 30. He said Barys showed him the prescription, which indicated he needed the tinted windows because he had secondary cataracts. Girard asked him if he had a handicapped parking placard, too. When Barys handed it over, he kept it and looked into the case in his spare time.

Barys, according to police reports, used a real prescription to make a fake prescription for the window tinting.

Barys, who once had a knee injury, had a legitimate placard that expired May 31, 2006. His doctor refused to sign a renewal application, Girard said. But Barys’ March 29, 2006, renewal application bore the signatures and ID numbers of two doctors, which Girard found were fake.

Barys has a Feb. 15 date in Cook County’s 2nd District Criminal Court in Skokie.