Beda Koorey is a 76-year-old retiree from Huntington, New York who doesn’t just have a name that sounds like it belongs to a Star Trek character but is also a huge Trekkie. So much so that she had a custom license plate honoring the USS Enterprise NCC-1701, the version of the ship commanded by Captain Kirk in the original series that aired on CBS from 1966 to 1969. Sadly, that fun license plate number has come back to haunt her, as countless across the country with Star Trek novelty plates are getting tickets—and she’s stuck with them.
Koorey doesn’t drive anymore. She stopped driving back in 2020. She sold her car and surrendered her license plate. Yet, opening her mailbox remains a terrifying experience because it may or may not contain a traffic ticket picked up by a stranger somewhere in the United States.
The unfortunate Trekkie gets speeding tickets, tickets for blowing through red lights, and parking and school zone violations. She once got a call from an Ohio police chief regarding a robbery involving a car with an NCC-1701 license plate. She gets tickets for motorcycle infractions. The fines addressed to her amount to thousands of dollars that she can’t pay because she’s on a fixed income, not to mention the obvious fact that she should be responsible for them in the first place.
You’d think she was a one-woman Mad Max-style marauder convoy, but she doesn’t even own a car. So how is this happening? Simple. There’s a Star Trek novelty license plate that you or anyone can buy online for dirt cheap. Here it is on Amazon, currently on sale for $17, down from the usual $20 list price. It has 4.9 stars with 1,546 reviews at the time of publication.
According to Amazon reviewers, it is very good at being a metal plate embossed with numbers. The first review I spotted in the “Top reviews from the United States” section comes from a woman named Wendy, who, on November 4, 2024, said, “It looks just like the license plate.” A ringing endorsement.
Apparently, there’s some kind of epidemic of people replacing their real license plate with the NCC-1701 license plate. No matter where they are in the country when they commit a traffic or parking violation, the ticket is sent to the poor Star Trek fan who once had an NCC-1701 license plate—Beda Koorey of Huntington, New York.
The New York DMV acknowledges the issue but can’t really do much about it because illegally replacing a legitimate license plate with a novelty one is more of a cop problem than a DMV problem. They do say, however, that her name isn’t associated with that license plate number in their official system.
Or, at least, that’s what they used to say, until they took a deeper look into the issue, likely because her story started getting national attention. They found that her license plate was still in fact tied to her. She is now working with the New York City Department of Finance to dispute the numerous violations other drivers have racked up on her behalf.
The post How a Woman’s Love of Star Trek Left Her With Endless Traffic Tickets appeared first on VICE.
The post How a Woman’s Love of Star Trek Left Her With Endless Traffic Tickets appeared first on VICE.
