Imagine you aren’t happy about a parking ticket, and when you find out you must pay a $1.75 fee to settle it with a debit card, you’re twice as grumpy. Then you come up with a great idea: pay the ticket with a pile of pennies so the bureaucratic jerks have to sit there and count all the coins.
This is exactly what Anthony Sevy did in Royal Oak, Michigan. But his symbolic protest led to an altercation that ended with a security guard slamming him to the ground so hard he defecated on himself. Eight years later, Sevy is still fighting for justice.
Royal Oak is a comparatively posh suburb in the greater Detroit metropolitan area. I live in Detroit and know Royal Oak is notoriously strict about parking tickets. But this story takes “strict” to a whole new level.
How the 2017 parking ticket pennies incident went down
This incident happened in the Royal Oak courthouse. When the clerk told Sevy they wouldn’t let him pay with pennies, the two got into a heated verbal exchange. Eventually, Court Officers Philip Barach and Harold Marshall arrived and asked Sevy to leave the premises…