As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. A mother on TikTok posted a video of her two daughters in Missouri helping a poor turtle off the road to save it from being run over. She says a cop was watching them rescue the animal the entire time. Yet 30 seconds later, he pulled the mother over not to commend them for their heroic action but to give them a citation.
Woman says the cop was “disrespectful” to her
Thus far, the video posted by the mother, known as @ellenjaz17 on TikTok, on July 20 has been viewed more than 2.5 million times and received over 112,000 likes. It is a repost of an earlier video she made on June 23, which is closer to when the incident occurred.
Multiple comments were angry with the situation and told her not to pay the ticket, with one saying that she should go to the judge and “explain [the turtle] was a road hazard and the police watching you do it should have been doing their job and removing it with their lights on in the middle of the road.”
Another wrote, “Is the traffic in the room with us? cus I don’t see any cars…” This made the mother respond, “Right! No one was coming yet. There’s a stop light to the left you just can’t see it and the light was red.”
In a lengtheir video, she provides a full account of what happened. The mother claims that she saw another car swerve to get out of the way of a turtle, and so she stopped her vehicle on the side of the road. Her daughters then went and picked up the turtle and placed it in the grass in the direction it was heading. The cop who was watching this happen later pulled her over.
She said, “I’m thinking, oh, he was going to congratulate us, you know, say thanks for saving the turtle, something along those lines.” She didn’t record the cop because she didn’t expect to have a bad experience with him.
Instead, the cop allegedly asked her for her license and registration, not answering her question on why she was being pulled over. He then gave her a ticket for impeding traffic, which she believes is ridiculous since the video shows that there weren’t any cars around at all.
The mother found her encounter with the cop to be “disrespectful” and said that he was “super rude and angry for no reason.” She has since hired an attorney and will be fighting the ticket in court.
