Then the real fun began.
Starting in May, the license-plate thief - like a shop-a-holic on Clover Day - began racking up tickets from the Philadelphia Parking Authority. For leaving the car in Fairmount Park at 3 a.m. For parking at bus stops and on sidewalks. And for not feeding meters from Center City to West Philly.
There are, to date, 34 tickets. The tab is $1,503 and running. And even though the license plate was stolen and expired, Roth is getting dunned for the tickets by the Parking Violations Branch of the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication.
That's a bureaucratic mouthful for the year-old agency that collects fines for parking tickets and hears appeals.
"It's just infuriating," says Roth, 51, a native of northern New Jersey. ''I never had an experience like this anywhere else."
If she could just find the car, Roth said, she would solve this problem herself. And so, she carries a screwdriver in her trunk in anticipation of the day she sees the old license plate and can hop out and reclaim it.
Like a general plotting a war, she made a chart of where her plate-thief had been ticketed, what day and what time of day, hoping to find a pattern to his lawlessness and thus, catch him cold.
No luck there.
She has spent entire days stalking the thief's favorite parking places - up and down Market Street, from the 2100 block to 30th Street Station, for example - in hopes of being there when he blocks a fire hydrant or hogs the curb by a bus stop.
No luck there either.
On Oct. 9, Roth says, she went down to the Parking Violations Branch on East Filbert Street to arrange for a hearing on her tickets, but the very polite person behind the glass told her that before that can happen, she needs an affidavit from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation in Harrisburg stating that the license plate in question is no longer hers.
