Fender Bender Earns City Hall Intern A Warning

An intern assigned to carry out an errand for a city official ended up in a fender-bender that earned him a police warning.

The incident occurred Tuesday morning in the Elm Street parking lot of Wells Fargo bank.

City youth services chief Jason Bartlett had driven to the branch with the intern in his department’s Ford Transit van. He was making a deposit at the bank.

Afterwards, Bartlett said, he gave the intern the van keys and some cash to head over to Hillhouse High School to pay for food the department had ordered from the Board of Ed kitchen for kids at the city’s YouthStat camp. Bartlett said he couldn’t make the trip himself because he had to head over the City Hall for a press conference about a basketball tournament the city’s hosting this weekend.

“I told [the intern] to pay for the food and get a receipt,” Bartlett said.

After Bartlett left, the intern pulled out of the lot — and the van’s passenger-side rear fender hit the rear bumper of an unoccupied Ford Explorer in the lot, according to Assistant Police Chief Racheal Cain. The minor collision left a slight dent in the unoccupied car’s bumper and cracked the rear light covering. Then the intern drove off to complete the errand.

It turns out the struck car belongs to the bank’s security guard. Who watched the collision. And who knows to whom the van belongs, since he sees Bartlett come in regularly to deposit money.

The guard called the police. An officer investigated.

The officer interviewed the intern, who readily admitted having driven the van, Cain said. She said the intern said he hadn’t realized that he had struck the unoccupied car.

“Based on the [minor] damage, it’s probable” that the intern honestly hadn’t realized he had tapped the other car, police concluded, according to Cain. She confirmed that Bartlett had not been in the van at the time of the fender-bender. An officer issued the intern a verbal warning for unsafe movement from the start-stop position and failure to leave his name and address.

“He’s a very sincere person. I don’t think he realized” he’d hit another vehicle, Bartlett said of the intern.

The security guard, Robert Liptrot, was skeptical.

Liptrot said he was in the guard booth when the collision occurred. Two elevator-repair people happened to be in the lot at the time, on break. They saw the collision, and one of them walked around the city van to speak to the driver, Liptrot said. When the intern drove off, the worker alerted Liptrot, who rushed out to speak to the intern, who was then parked at the traffic light at Orange and Elm streets. The light turned before Liptrot could reach him, Liptrot said.

“There’s no way he would pull up, stop after being hit, and then back up” without realizing what happened, Liptrot asserted. He said he doesn’t know if the intern noticed the elevator-repairman seeking to get his attention.