You Shall Not School Pass

I work at a major college baseball stadium. Parking is a major issue. The premium parking spots cost big bucks and most people opt against it. There is a small business located directly across the street from the stadium that probably makes more profit off of selling season-long gameday parking passes than it does all year on whatever it actually sells.

For some reason, because the business’s lot is slightly less expensive than school-issued premium parking passes, it attracts the locals who think they’re rich.

How it works is that everyone has a pass, and they flash it to the security guard working the gate to enter before the game. Sometime during the game, the guard leaves, and at that point, it’s the honor system. Most of the time, people have enough respect not to park there if they show up late and they aren’t pass holders.

We have a large game with record-breaking crowds. The game has finished, and probably thirty minutes after the final out, I get a call from one of my poor female student employees who is getting the a**-chewing of her life from some parents. They are loudly berating the girl watching over the parking in the SCHOOL-ISSUED PREMIUM PARKING. She has nothing to do with the business’s parking. They are infuriated that someone in the business’s lot doesn’t have a tag and is parking where they paid extreme amounts of money to park.

It’s a good ten-minute walk from the part of the stadium where I am to the actual lot, so I grab my Campus Police Department buddy who is working overtime that night for the game, and we make our way to the situation. By the time we get there, the angry parents have gotten into their 1995 Suburban, attached chains to a brand-new F150, and dragged it out from the lot into the middle of the street, which is full of contraflow cars trying to leave.

The cops are already overwhelmed as it is, so there’s basically nothing to stop them. When we get there, we see the F150 sitting in the middle of the road, and the dumba** Suburban driver is going back into the lot looking for more “violators”. My poor employee is crying and shaking so we send her home for the night.

The cop and I head into the lot looking for the Suburban driver and discover him looking into cars for their passes. We confront him, and my buddy immediately cuffs him and his wife. We question them and figure out why they decided to take it upon themselves to enforce the lot.

This is where the best part of the story comes in… they don’t have a pass themselves!

To this day, I have no idea if they actually bought one and forgot it or not, but they don’t have one and their Suburban is sitting empty on the lot as they are both cuffed on the ground. My buddy (with the biggest smile on his face) calls in the tow company and has the Suburban towed away because of illegal parking.

He then books the two parents for some type of damage to property and theft. (I honestly can’t remember.) Once the owner of the F150 gets to it, he chooses to press charges, and it turns out he actually did have a pass sitting on his floor that had fallen from his mirror at some point.

I’ll never forget watching those two get hauled off in a cop car as their car rode on the back of a tow truck to some yard somewhere.